APPLICATIONS

Neterion announced that its Xframe products were part of McGill University's Ultra-Videoconferencing team that won the award for "Most Innovative Use of New Technology" at the recently concluded Supercomputing 2005 Conference in Seattle. The demonstration featured live interaction between two musical ensembles. One was based in Montreal and another in Seattle. A single conductor on site with the Seattle group directed both ensembles at the same time. The McGill-hosted demonstration featured three side-by-side 65-inch plasma screens and HD video cameras from Panasonic, HP workstations equipped with Neterion's 10 GbE Xframe adapters, AMD's dual core Opteron processors and AJA Xena HD-SDI video capture cards running on Linux. Viewers were treated to uncompressed, rich HD (high definition) video content, multi-channel studio-quality audio and latency levels less than 50 nanoseconds, enabling real-time interactivity. The extremely low latency ensured the two musical groups in Seattle and Montreal could read the music, play each instrument with the same tempo and follow a single director with no delay, as if they were in the same concert hall. "This was a stunning example of the broadband capabilities that 10 Gigabit Ethernet can deliver to enhance the end user experience," noted Dave Zabrowski, President & CEO of Neterion. "This technology has many other important applications in rich content areas such as telemedicine, live event simulcasts and real-time sharing of military intelligence." With one box, Ultra-Videoconferencing can broadcast one channel of uncompressed, bi-directional HD-SDI video plus as many multiples of 10 channels of 96kHz/24bit bi-directional audio as can fit into the servers' PCI slots. The CPU requirement depends entirely on what modes of transport and coding are involved. "Modern videoconferencing hasn't worked well because its increased latency, or delay, doesn't allow people to interact with one another and has never managed to support the quality of interaction that people experience in real life," said John Roston, Director of Instructional Multimedia Services at McGill University. "Our technology provides a life size, high definition view on a large panoramic screen, which gives users the impression that they're talking to people in the same room." A combination of declining costs for 10 GbE network infrastructure equipment, as well as reductions in pricing for the ancillary HD displays and cameras, is transitioning Ultra-Videoconferencing from the lab to the enterprise as companies recognize the advantages and applications relative to this technology. For further information on the demonstration and the technology of McGill's Ultra-Videoconferencing, please visit its Web site.