As a founding member of the Internet2 Consortium, Penn has always been at the forefront of participation in the research and education networking global community. Faculty, staff, and students at the University of Pennsylvania leverage the power of MAGPI and Internet2 in new and exciting ways in the lab and in the classroom.

Advanced Video Technologies

Advanced video technologies and collaborative tools are allowing organizations on the MAGPI and Internet2 networks to communicate in new and exciting ways.

Access Grid® is a suite of collaboration technologies that enable large scale (wall or room sized) group collaboration including live video, audio, and data sharing. The Access Grid® is an ensemble of resources including multimedia large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to Grid middleware and to visualization environments. These resources are used to support group-to-group interactions across the Grid.

Microsoft Research's Conference XP software allows for distributed interactive collaboration spaces using a virtual venue. It integrates recent advances in high-performance audio, video, and network technologies to seamlessly connect multiple, distant participants in a rich, immersive environment for distance conferencing, instruction, and collaboration. ConferenceXP provides an extensible foundation for interactive collaborative environments and serves as a research platform for designing and implementing distance conferencing and learning applications. Currently, it is being used for multi-institutional instruction, distance learning, and advanced research collaboration. MAGPI runs a Conference XP test node that is available to MAGPI Members.

The Digital Video Transport System (DVTS) is a simple and inexpensive method of transmitting high-quality video and audio over the Internet. DVTS uses 30 Mbps uncompressed video to provide high-quality images with low latency. DVTS can also be used in multicast mode to allow three or more sites to participate in a single conference. More broadly, DVTS is a step toward a world in which you will be able to tune your computer to a series of educational channels the same way you tune your television to satellite channels—send and receive high-quality video across the Internet with the same ease as sending and receiving email - - and do all this without any significant capital expenditure.  DVTS-based telemicroscopy is used for real time clinical case consultation between pathologists at the three Philadelphia hospitals that make up the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The Office of Cultural Affairs at Montgomery County Community College used DVTS to conduct dance critiques between dancers in Pennsylvania and choreographers in Japan.

Dynamic Circuit Networks

A new service offering from Internet2 called “Dynamic Circuit Networks” gives MAGPI the ability to provide from 1Gbps to 10 Gbps of bandwidth from an appropriately connected institution in PA, NJ, or DE to another similarly connected site in the United States and even specific locations in Europe.  Campuses of universities and research facilities can dynamically create these pathways for limited periods of time and then disconnect the circuit when the application is finished.  This resolves issues such as the research requirement for large amounts of bandwidth, but limits the financial responsibility to the length of the transmission.  Once the internal infrastructure is created, institutions can share this high capacity access for minimal cost and effort.  The University of Pennsylvania has requested this service for downloading very large files to their High Energy Physics Department from the Large Hadron Collider [PDF] in Cern, Switzerland.

Interactive Videoconferencing

Videoconferencing allows people in geographically distributed locations to see and hear each other and collaborate in real-time. Increasingly, videoconferencing is becoming part of the standard set of tools used by teachers, students, faculty, staff, librarians and researchers to enhance communication, training, and instruction. Public and cultural organizations are using videoconferencing to expand their outreach opportunities and reach audiences beyond their geographic proximity through virtual lectures and field trips. MAGPI supports the use of videoconferencing within our member community through interactive educational programming, training and technical support.

MAGPI Members can facilitate multisite videconferences through MAGPI’s in house videoconferencing and multimedia services. This service provides a large-scale deployment of tools for one-to-one, one-to-group, and group-to-group collaborations enabling the research and education community to hold distributed working groups, classes, meetings, and events. Through this service offering, MAGPI members can conduct multi-site videoconference events, as well as webstream those events live and archive them. See our Multimedia Services page to find out more or schedule a session.

IPv6 Addressing

IPv6 is the next version of the Internet Protocol, the data packaging and routing standard on which the Internet is based. The current version is IPv4; IPv5 was experimental and was never widely deployed.IPv6 offers several improvements over IPv4. Most importantly, with 128-bit Internet addresses instead of the 32-bit addresses of IPv4, IPv6 vastly increases the number of addresses available from about 4 billion to about 340 trillion trillion trillion.

Given the continued rapid growth of the Internet, ensuring an abundance of addresses is crucial. The proliferation of wired and (especially) wireless devices means that in the near future not one or two, but many addresses will be required for each person who uses the Internet. The techniques currently employed to cope with the shortage of IPv4 addresses are reaching their limits, and many of these techniques — such as temporary address assignment and network address translation — compromise engineering principles fundamental to the Internet’s success, thus jeopardizing its future growth.

Multicast

Multicast is a set of technologies that enables efficient delivery of data to many locations on a network. In today’s Internet, the dominant model of communication is “unicast”—the data source must create a separate copy of the data for each recipient. When there are many recipients, and when large amounts of data (e.g. streaming video) are being sent, unicast becomes prohibitively wasteful of bandwidth. The key idea behind multicast is to create each recipient's copy of each message at a point as close to that recipient as possible, thus minimizing the bandwidth consumed. In July 2007, MAGPI worked with the Friends of Live Earth Global Screens Program to send out a 30 mbps webstream of the 24-hour Live Earth Concert to campuses and organizations on the MAGPI and Internet2 networks, as well as other research and education networks worldwide. Northwestern University and Video Furnace, in collaboration with C-SPAN and Internet2, make live, high-quality C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 broadcasts [PDF] available 24 hours a day to anyone with an Internet2 network connection that is multicast capable.