Metaverse-u
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Presentation for Stanford's Metaverse U conference; May, 2009
Talk Abstract
ScienceSim (http://sciencesim.com) is a collaboration of academic and commercial institutions externalizing their OpenSim servers and cooperating on the development of foundation tools and technologies to support science education in the metaverse. Our current focus is large scale collaborative visualizations such as protein folding and galaxy formation, which are driven in real-time by simulations running on out-of-world high performance computing (HPC) resources. Our goal is to build collaborative, interactive and visually rich forums for science and teaching.
This talk will be an in-world tour of ScienceSim led by avatar/person Mic Bowman of Intel, with in-person running commentary from Charlie Peck of Earlham College and Tom Murphy of Contra Costa College. Sights will include fern propagation, Mt St. Helens, science in the large via galaxy formation, and in the small via the nanopattern formation of polymers. Along the way we'll describe the OpenSim performance mods necessary to support resource scaling, ExtSim for supporting in-world visualizations, voice, and in-world to out-of-world controls.
Speaker Bios
Charlie Peck
Charlie Peck is an associate professor of computer science at Earlham College in Richmond, IN. As a member of the SuperComputing Conference's Education Program Steering Committee (2007-2011) he is one of a group of people developing and delivering curriculum for teaching high performance computing and computational science to undergraduate faculty and students. Charlie's student/faculty research covers how 3D Internet technology such as metaverses can be used to support science education (http://sciencesim.com), parallelism in the undergraduate computer science curriculum, and scaling scientific kernels to the next generation of petascale computational resources. Working with colleagues from the Education Program, Charlie is co-PI of the LittleFe project (http://LittleFe.net). LittleFe is a low-cost, portable, computational cluster primarily used for high performance computing and computational science education, outreach, and training.
Mic Bowman
Mic Bowman is a Principal Engineer in Intel’s Corporate Technology Group where he investigates scalable software architectures for “Immersive Connected Experience”. Bowman received his BS from the University of Montana, and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Arizona. Bowman has developed a number of large-scale distributed systems including the first distributed search service for the Web (Harvest, 1993). More recently, he led the Intel team that built and deployed PlanetLab, a global testbed for networking and distributed systems research that runs at 500 academic and industrial labs worldwide and a winner of the “Top 50 Technologies” award from Scientific American.
Tom Murphy
Tom Murphy is professor of computer science at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, Ca. Tom and Charlie work on a lot of the same stuff together so their bios are fairly similar. Tom is the funnier one and Charlie is the taller one. One difference is that Tom primarily works with community college students, while Charlie is working with liberal arts students. Secondarily, they work with each others students, which provides many valuable experiences and experience for all involved.
Talk Outline
Requirements (5 minutes)
- Generate complex scene data out-of-world
- Visualize complex scenes in-world
- Collaboration - see and control what's happening in-world by communicating to out-of-world
- Supports teaching in a variety of ways
Improving OpenSim for ScienceSim (5 minutes)
- Scaling
- ExtSim
- Voice
- In-world -> out-of-world controls
- Examples
Examples (10 minutes)
- Fern islands - internal simulations, before optimizations max 1K, now 10K
- Fe's stuff (email) - external simulations
- GalaxSee - external simulation with in-world controls
Slides:
- One slide for purpose/requirements
- One slide for Improving OpenSim for ScienceSim
- One slide each for the examples
Notes:
- You're the scientist, what do you think is most important?
- Collaborative scientific visualization is the primary use case we have been pushing.
- LSL scripting with HTTP requests, OpenSim can parse ason/Ajax? Lots of other choices. MPI client in OpenSim? MRM module? LSL seems like the choice. XML-RPC .NET library is another choice.
- Test-drive early Friday morning or sometime Thursday with Joel.
- Phone bridge rather than depending on voice in region.
- Mic will talk to Fe ye and Erin to prep them.
- Use case - visualizing large number of objects in an OpenSim region.
- Connecting back-end data sources
- EOT - Tom/Charlie
