Speaker
Mr
Philippe Galvez
(California Institute of Technology)
Description
The EVO (Enabling Virtual Organizations) system is based on a new distributed and
unique architecture, leveraging the 10+ years of unique experience of developing and
operating the large distributed production based VRVS collaboration system. The
primary objective being to provide to the High Energy and Nuclear Physics experiments
a system/service that meet their unique requirements of usability, quality,
scalability, reliability, and cost necessary for nationally and globally distributed
research organizations.
The EVO system, which will be officially released during March/April 2007 includes a
better-integrated and more convenient user interface, a richer feature set including
higher resolution video and instant messaging, greater adaptability to all platforms
and operating systems, and higher overall operational efficiency and robustness. All
of these aspects will be particularly important as we approach and then enter the
startup period of the LHC because the community will require an unprecedented level
of daily collaboration. There will be intense demand for long distance scheduled
meetings, person-to-person communication, group-to-group discussions, broadcast
meetings, workshops and continuous presence at important locations such as control
rooms and experimental areas. The need to have the collaboration tools totally
integrated in the physicists’ working environments will gain great importance.
Beyond all these user-features, another key enhancement is the collaboration
infrastructure network created by EVO, which covers the entire globe and which is
fully redundant and resilient to failure. The EVO infrastructure automatically adapts
to the prevailing network configuration and status, so as to ensure that the
collaboration service runs without disruption. Because we are able to monitor the
end-user’s node, we are able to inform the user of any potential or arising problems
(e.g. excessive CPU load or packet loss) and, where possible, to fix the problems
automatically and transparently on behalf of the user (e.g. by switching to another
server node in the network, by reducing the number of video streams received, et
cetera). The integration of the MonALISA architecture into this new EVO
architecture was an important step in the evolution of the service towards a globally
distributed dynamic system that is largely autonomous.
The EVO system is intended to become the primary collaboration system used by the
High Energy and Nuclear Physics community going forward.
Primary author
Mr
Philippe Galvez
(California Institute of Technology)
Co-author
Prof.
Harvey Newman
(California Institute of Technology)
