The AccessGrid (AG) was developed by the FuturesLab at Argonne National Laboratory.
The "Alliance Chautauqua 99", a series of two-day conferences on computational science organised by the NCSA, was the first large-scale AG event. The AG was later demonstrated at Supercomputing'99 in Portland to an international audience.
The first US West coast’s AG was installed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego in January 2000 by B. Pailthorpe, J Moreland and N Bordes. The SDSC AG was used on 23-24 March 2000, to host a West coast / Washington DC President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) meeting for about 30 west coast CEOs, who did not have to fly to Washington DC.
Australia’s first AG node was installed at Sydney VisLab at the Australian Technology Park, with funding from an ARC grant to VisLab, by B. Pailthorpe, C Willing, et al in August 01 (1st multicast packets to USA, etc during testing in Aug’01).
Vislab-ATP hosted the Australia-wide participation by APAC to SC-Global 2001, a 30-AG site event, led from Denver (Nov 14, ’01) and spanning all continents.
• ten Australian
researchers saved travel costs to USA
• the planning for this
event included early tests of the then new
Southern Cross cable to USA – real-time usage mode requires latency
tuning to 256 ms for Sydney-Manchester (x2 improvement; and within
factor of two of speed-of-light limit)
• our all-linux
implementation simplified the installation and reduced
the
cost of the installation by half. This design was used in all the
Australian AG nodes and is now supplanted by AGv2. This design also
enables the dual use of AG node as a PowerWall computer display. See publications section.
What is the AccessGrid?
The Access Grid is an integrated environment that supports group-to-group communication using high-speed networks over the Internet. It provides high-quality audio and real-time video that allow groups at multiple sites to interact simultaneously and share data and scientific instruments.
The first Australian Access Grid Node was installed in VisLab (in labs at the ATP and USyd Physics) by Pailthorpe and Willing and became operational on the 29th August 2001.
Meeting participants (both local and distant) appear in windows projected onto a large screen. The current display resolution we use is 3840 x 1024 pixels. Additionally, data windows from participants' laptop computers can be integrated into the meeting (eg. display images, movies, presentations, spreadsheets).Our added value to the Access Grid is a lower cost than the traditional Access Grid for the same performance and the system is based entirely on Linux. The original Access Grid prototype at ANL relies on a mix of Linux and Windows NT.