SC98 - Stay at home and still be there with the live webcast

As soon as SCinet is up and running, NCSA will begin streaming video from the conference floor. A camera will be set up to observe the creation of the show floor.

SC98:High Performance Networking and Computing conference is in Orlando, Nov. 7 - 13. SC98 is sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and ACM SIGARCH. SCinet98, the on-site high performance network, is working with NCSA on these webcasts. The webcasts will use RealNetworks 5.0 software for live "streaming" and NCSA will archive presentations as storage permits. RealNetworks ( www.real.com ) is a multiple unicast technology, viewed from a web browser using a plug-in available free from the company.

NCSA's Visualization Technology Support Group began the Streaming Multimedia initiative as a direct result of Director Larry Smarr's vision of using leading edge collaborative tools in the computational infrastructure of the 21st century. Presently, NCSA streams video and audio in bit rates from 16kbps for modem users to 8mbps for high frame rate collaborative sessions using the National Science Foundation's very high performance Backbone Network Service (NSF's vBNS). "The Alliance is well on its way to achieving the vision of "desktop to supercomputer' collaboration at sites throughout the world," said Hank Kaczmarski, head of NCSA's Visualization Technology Support Group. "We've done this using collaborative tools being developed at NCSA and other Alliance sites, videoconferencing over the vBNS and ISDN lines, live and archived streaming multimedia, and applying Silicon Graphics' Infinite Reality graphics engines as 'windows into a supercomputer."

NCSA also webcasts Alliance announcements, conferences, and tutorial sessions in a manner that can bring the supercomputing experience to everyone with Internet access.