Special Features:

DRI, NEVADA ACES LAUNCH COLLABORATION, VISUALIZATION FACILITIES

Reno, Nevada's Desert Research Institute (DRI) recently launched its new, groundbreaking collaboration and visualization facility to a rapt audience of participants. DRI's new facility, ACES VisLab, which is a large, state-of-the-art visualization laboratory and a meeting room replete with 17 foot wall-to-wall screen and a separate stereoscopic, 3-D display, is the anchor location for the Nevada state Advanced Computing in Environmental Science Program, a National Science Foundation-funded, multi-year project linking Nevada's university and research campuses. ACES will foment computing-driven, collaborative research on environmental, atmospheric, biological, and geological subjects. ACES leverages robust, high-speed Internet2 network connections between DRI (Reno and Las Vegas facilities), University of Nevada Reno, University of Nevada Las Vegas, and UNLV's National Supercomputing Center for Energy and the Environment (NSCEE). ACES VisLab also leverages advanced collaboration software provided by inSORS and sophisticated display and visualization systems provided by Panoram Technologies.

The DRI facility "Grand Opening" occurred on Oct. 21 and featured a live video and visualization-rich virtual conference between eleven participating campuses. The University of Missouri, University of Kentucky, , University of Illinois, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) joined the Nevada locations of DRI Reno, DRI Las Vegas, University of Nevada-Reno, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and the National Supercomputing Center for Energy and the Environment (NSCEE). Three of these Nevada locations, the VisLab at DRI Reno, UNR, and NSCEE were established by the ACES program. The live, virtual conference featured forty high-speed streams of video, live high-quality audio interaction, shared presentations, and an immersive, 3-D shared visualization.

Commenting on her new facility, Vanda Grubisic, director of the ACES VisLab, and an Assistant Research Professor at the Division of Atmospheric Sciences at DRI, noted the immediate applications of her Vislab, her team already immersed in several distributed collaborations: "the inSORS Grid node in the ACES VisLab (at DRI) has been used quite extensively for an array of applications from the in- and out-of-state virtual meetings with shared Power Point content; to ACES tutorials delivered on the Grid, to individual work sessions connecting a DRI (Reno) and SCRIPPS (San Diego) scientists working on a joint scientific publications."

InSORS is a Chicago-based software firm providing advanced, virtual collaboration software called the "Grid." Panoram Technologies is a Los Angeles-based visualization hardware manufacturer and integrator. Both firms support the Nevada ACES program.