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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
EARLY LBNL GRID EXPERIMENT, VIRTUAL FROG, STILL A WEB STAPLE
In the wild, a frog may live to 10 years, assuming it survives tadpolehood and
doesn't get eaten by a bird or a fish or some other creature. On the Web,
though, a virtual frog named "Fluffy" has easily notched its tenth year
despite millions of dissections.
Launched in June 1994 by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, the Virtual Frog Dissection Kit Web site allows users to
virtually dissect a frog without all that smelly formaldehyde of high school
science class. While the frog has been accessed more than 15 million times by
English-speaking users, 13 percent of those visiting the site are dissecting
either la rana (Spanish), der Frosch (German), la Grenouille (French), a Râ
(Portuguese), la Rana (Italian), zaba (Czech) or de kikker (Dutch).
The Virtual Frog site can be found at http://dsd.lbl.gov/Frog/ , and has been
found by users in more than 130 countries.
"We know it's still being used because whenever the server goes down, we get a
lot of e-mail from around the world, mainly from teachers who use the site in
their classes," said Bill Johnston, currently head of the Department of
Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which is managed by Berkeley Lab.
Johnston and other members of the former Imaging Technologies Group, now part
of the Lab's Distributed Systems Department, developed the Virtual Frog. While
the Virtual Frog has remained virtually unchanged over the past decade, the
research behind the site has advanced by leaps and bounds, leading to Berkeley
Lab's prominent role in the development of Grid technologies.
"The Virtual Frog was a direct result of our early work in wide-area
distributed computing and visualization," Johnston said. "And this has led
directly to our involvement in developing collaborative technologies and Grid
applications."
The frog was originally spawned by LBNL's work in developing software to
create visual renderings of sets of diagnostic cross-section images used in
medicine, allowing scientists to create 3-D renderings from MRI data. This
capability was first demonstrated at the 1991 Supercomputing conference in
Albuquerque, N.M., the first conference in that series to have a high-speed
network connection (45 Mb per second).
Once the software was developed, Johnston said, he began to think about what
to do with it. The line of thinking led to DOE's education programs, and then
to secondary schools. "Obviously, the choice was to create a frog."
The first step was to obtain a specimen, which was purchased at a Berkeley pet
shop and then euthanized following a strict, UC-approved protocol for handling
animals for experiments. Once the amphibian was dead, lab assistant Katie
Brennan brought it out to the team with her hands clasped around the creature.
She opened them slowly and declared, "Voila -- Fluffy!" A star was named.
Next, the challenge was to use LBNL's research MRI machine to create the
layered images. "No matter what they did, the images came out mushy," Johnston
said. The cause turned out to be the dark green spots on the frog's back.
Containing iron oxide pigment, the spots set up magnetic fields that wreaked
havoc on the imaging system. "It just would not work."
Anat Biegon had a cryotome machine on the University of California at Berkeley
campus that used a swinging diamond blade to make extremely thin slices of
tissue. Fluffy was encased in a block of frozen thermosetting plastic and
reduced to 130 slices, each one-tenth of a millimeter thick. After each slice
was removed, the remaining portion of the frog was photographed (see
"Available Image Data" at the Web site for the photographs).
Each of the photos was then digitized, and UC-Berkeley biology student Craig
Logan carried out the laborious task of segmentation -- using a pen to outline
critical organs or systems on each of the 130 slides. Wing Nip, a computer
science student at San Francisco State University, worked with Logan on
digitizing the images.
"That is what allows you to manipulate 11 different anatomical systems," said
David Robertson, who developed the Virtual Frog Dissection Kit that makes the
whole thing work. "This was one of the first, if not the first, 3-D rendering
applications on the Web."
Of course, as Robertson admits, there wasn't a whole lot of anything on the
Web in those days. As a result, the frog regularly made the "top 10 Web sites"
lists popular at the time. And because many people were still using 9,600 baud
modems, Robertson had compressed the images to make them more easily
accessible.
With no search engines and minimal marketing, the Virtual Frog leapt to
prominence by word of mouth. And a holiday greeting card. In the mid-1990s,
the Lab Director's Christmas card featured Fluffy's skeleton, adorned with a
ribbon and bow at the neck.
"The usage went up exponentially," Johnston said.
"It rapidly shot up to 1.5 million hits a year," Robertson added. "And it
continues to get up to 40,000 hits a day from 130 countries."
Site visits finally leveled off in 2002, a year after DOE's Web Council
honored the Virtual Frog as representative of DOE's best Web resources,
saluting its "ability to provide the public with valuable content in a
user-friendly format." The site has also been recognized by the U.S.
Department of Education, the BBC, numerous magazines and Web publications. And
it officially entered pop culture in November 1999 when the dissection kit was
featured in the "Frog Stuff" category on the Jeopardy TV game show.
In a case of what is old becoming new again, the compression techniques that
allowed quick display of images over a 9600 baud modem now enable people with
"smart phones" to call up the Virtual Frog using the browsers on the phones,
which typically have low-bandwidth wireless connections.
"I don't think any of us realized how popular -- and how enduring -- the site
would become," Johnston said. "What started as something of an experiment has
become an institution."
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