Currently high-end visualizations assume a dedicated bandwidth between the data source, the rendering engine and the viewer. If in fact, these elements are separated by wide-area network links then the bandwidth available between them is dynamically changing. The toolkit will provide network measurement and monitoring capabilities and will aid the visualization system in determining the appropriate method to use in sending the visualization data across the network. This toolkit also intends to support collaborative remote visualizations where the receiving sites have heterogeneous network bandwidth capabilities. This project is still in the early stages of building its first prototype version of the advanced visualization communication toolkit and the intern will have the opportunity to get involved in the design and development of this prototype.
Many applications require reliable delivery of messages.
There is a class of reliable multicast protocols available today that work well in a local-area network environment and provide very strong reliability and ordering of messages. These protocols, however, have significant drawbacks when used across the Internet. Reliable multicast protocols that allow only one member of the group to be a sender do scale to the Internet but restricting the group to only a single sender is inappropriate for many applications. The Distributed Computing and Collaboration Group is helping to build a new reliable multicast protocol that will allow multi-sender groups and will scale to the Internet. There are several radical new advances incorporated into this new protocol that allow it to achieve its goals.