The new extreme-bandwidth standard: 35 Gbit/s into one location during iGrid2002 in Amsterdam

The Lambda connections also have a very low latency. This is partially due to the technology, and partially because, in this case, they were dedicated lines. Setting up these types of networks still requires a lot of people, in the iGrid case, several tens of persons on both sides of the ocean, who have intense contact: it is a craft. This can give some problems when connections have to be made to different parts of the globe. Not so much because networking technicians care much about working at normal office hours. When they say they prefer to work with light, they are talking about illuminated fiber, not daylight. But, for instance the WCTW offices are normally closed for a few hours per night.

These high-networking speeds are in fact larger than the interconnect speed inside most of today's computers. Strange things can be observed then. For instance, in some cases, the computers just cannot keep up with the speed and low latency of the data coming in.

A number of applications tried to fill up all the bandwidth in Amsterdam. There were, for instance, several art demonstrations using multiple Caves, and remote computing. The French artist Matisse developed a system where you can interact with a number of kites in a Cave. You can change the texture and add wind (you cannot do that on the beach, can you?). The movement of each kite is calculated on a different machine, located somewhere on the world. The results are transmitted to a Cave. The kites can fly through each other. There one can see the artist's touch: a computer graphics engineer would have build collision detection in the model.

In Beatbox, a number of virtual instrument families can be played by participants in different Caves. Together they can compose or play one piece of music. The persons themselves are represented in the Cave by an avatar. Each person moves in the same virtual environment, but can be at a different place than the others, of course. A challenge here is to synchronise sound, control and image. The human ear is very sensitive to synchronisation errors in music.

In PAAPAB (Pick An Avatar, Pick A Beat) a virtual reality disco is created. You pick an avatar, show him how you would like it to move, and off it goes to the virtual disco floor joining avatars created by other people in other Caves. (Well, that is the intention of the designers, I showed my avatar to scratch his head. He learned quickly and off he went to the dance floor of the Virtual Grid, scratching his head. That is one of the nice things of the early Grid, you can be (one of) the first ever to have done something on it.

Collaborative work was another broad theme of iGrid 2002. This ranged from the video-on demand interactive Research Channel to intense collaborative environements. The Research Channel showed HDTV over IP. In uncompressed form that eats up 1.5 Gbit/s of bandwidth. But then you have high-quality streaming video and audio. In Amsterdam, a number of displays were fed with broadcasts and video-on-demand from all over the world. Amongst these were programmes showing the works of Gaudi, and a reconstruction of the ancient site of Olympia in Greece.

An Access Grid node was also installed in Amsterdam. This allows for collabartion over the Grid. Teams share several screens, that can display items from shared presentations to visualisation results. Audio and video links allow to view the teams at other nodes and talk to them. It is not yet like being in the same room, but it is coming closer to that.

In intense collaborative environments, one is embedded in a virtual reality setting in which people at other locations can participate. Agave, AccessGrid within a Cave is an example of this.

All iGrid demonstrations were either e-Science or art-oriented. This shows that there is still a long way to go before these high-end Grid applications using Gbit/s networks will hit main stream computing.