GOVERNMENT

Faster than a bolt of lightning. More powerful than anything Bill Gates has put together. Able to leap a continent in a split second - the dawn of a new era in architecture is taking flight. Two teams of Carleton University students, thousands of kilometers apart, will be linked Monday via computer network "lightpaths" in a unique demonstration of the future of digital design in architecture as part of the global iGrid 2005 showcase. The students from the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) have been selected for an opening night presentation at iGrid 2005, one of the largest aggregations of computing and data transmission bandwidth ever assembled for research. One of roughly 50 demonstrations over the event's three days, the CIMS demonstration will showcase the commercial potential of architecture and high performance Grid computing. Led by Professor Michael Jemtrud, Director of CIMS, the nine students will work simultaneously on a highly detailed, complex three-dimensional digital replica of the famous Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, near San Diego, established by Dr. Jonas Salk, the creator of the polio vaccine. Now, 40 years later, the Salk Institute is the leading U.S. research base for vaccines against bioterrorism. "What we are doing today signals a paradigm shift in the world of architectural design and CIMS is leading the way," said Jemtrud, who accompanied the student design team in San Diego. "We are showing that the technology now exists to quickly link architects, designers, engineers and construction teams together in a seamless real-time digital work environment for flawless execution in a fraction of the time of traditional processes." One team will be at the CIMS lab at Carleton University and the other will be at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego. A high-definition video link will connect the two teams to enable real-time, face-to-face collaboration. "This demonstration shows how the most creative minds can come together anywhere in the world to imagine and construct together in rich, digitally enabled collaborative work environments," said Jemtrud. "The complex digital re-construction will include precise and accurate details and design features in a 3-D model which will have a highly-rendered and sophisticated quality to it." CIMS is using CA*Net 4, Canada's high-speed national research and education network established by Ottawa's CANARIE Inc., linked to other high speed research networks as part of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) a international virtual high speed computer research network. The massive quantities of data for the CIMS students' designs will travel on User Controlled LightPaths (UCLP) or fibre-optic linked networks at speeds of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). That is the equivalent of transmitting all the music on 1.5 compact discs in a second, an entire DVD movie in about four seconds, or 20,000 web pages in one second. "It is exciting to see CA*net 4 transforming not only what people do but how they do it," said Andrew Bjerring, President and CEO of Ottawa-based CANARIE. "CIMS is demonstrating the practical utility of lightpath capabilities and the power of the network to allow them to create new collaborations and achieve innovative results." "Whether used by scientific collaborators, Hollywood or teams of architects thousands of miles apart, there is a need for quality and security guarantees for high-resolution and super-high-resolution streaming media," said Maxine Brown, Co-chair of iGrid 2005. "CIMS is showcasing the value-added that 10 to 20Gb of persistent connectivity can bring to the design and engineering of structures, just as it does for interactive conferencing, remote scientific observation, long-distance educational mentoring, or distributed media production." In addition to CANARIE, the CIMS demonstration involves the support of a number of partners including the Communications Research Centre (CRC), the National Research Council (NRC), and corporate partners such as IBM , Cisco Canada and Alias Wavefront. The live event will take place at the CIMS lab at Carleton University at 11 p.m. on Monday September 26, 2005. The CIMS lab is located in room 448 of the Azrieli Pavilion at Carleton University.