GreenLight Education

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A Collaborative Platform Based on SAGE
Javier Delgado Javier Figueroa Yanelis
Hernandez Mark Joselli Zhao Juan Bi Shuren Silvio
Stanzani Guangqiang Zhao Shiyun Zhang Li Fangxin
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Outline

• Overview
• Finished Work and Publications (GCB 2008)
• Current Work (GCB 2009)
• Description
• Milestones
• Conclusion

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Motivation

• Desire for integrated collaboration platform
• E-learning
• Video conferencing
• Visualization in high-resolution
• Desktop sharing

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The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)

• Scalable
• Hundreds of Screens can be used
• Built with HPC applications in mind
• Extensible
• Provides functions for creating custom SAGE
  applications

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Outline

• Overview
• Finished Work and Publications (GCB 2008)
• Current Work (GCB 2009)
• Description
• Milestones
• Conclusion

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2008 SAGE Team

• Miami
• Javier Delgado and Javier Figueroa (FIU)
• Brazil
• Silvio Santos (USP) and Mark Joselli (UFF)
• China
• Zhao Juan and Bi Shuren (CNIC)

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Overview

• Identifying what was needed
• Research and Implementation
• Results

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Identifying Shortcomings

• Scenarios
• Remote learning Showing slides
• Collaboration for code sharing
• Findings
• Limited Applications
• Performance of remote desktop is lacking
• Clumsy interaction

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2008 Goals

• Provide a web browser
• Improve remote desktop experience
• Improve human-machine-interface

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Enhancements to SAGE

• Web browser
• Many new applications are web-based
• The web browser is the platform
• Native SAGE web browser gives optimum performance
• Remote Desktop enhancement
• Essential for e-learning
• Display can be shared amongst collaborators

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Implementation

• Decided to modify Firefox
• Performed analysis of how it works
• Developed plan

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Remote Desktop

• Qualitative experiments
• Is it adequate for showing presentation slides?
• Is it reliable?
• Quantitative experiments
• Bandwidth consumed during VNC sessions
• Interconnection testing
• Researching alternatives

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Remote Desktop

• Reference application presentation with
  animations
• Measured the bandwidth used with different
  interconnection distance and quality

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Testing the Interconnection
Full-bandwidth VNC session followed by SAGE VNC
session at 1 frame-per-second
40MB Secure Copy (SCP) Transfer
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VNC Versus Others

• VNC
• Advantages
• SAGE implementation exists
• Simple design
• Available for all major platforms
• Disadvantages
• Simplicity designed to ignore requests for
  framebuffer updates when server detects lack of
  bandwidth
• RDP Limited cross-platform functionality
• NX too complex

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Improving SAGE Display user interface

• Traditional mice make it difficult to work with a
  tiled display
• Wii remote provides more natural interaction

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Implementation
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Results for 2008 program

• Created technical report for each of the three
  sub-projects
• Published findings for remote desktop and wiimote
  implementation in 2009 Western Canadian
  Conference on Computing Education

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Outline

• Overview
• Finished Work and Publications (GCB 2008)
• Current Work (GCB 2009)
• Description
• Milestones
• Conclusion

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Overview

• 6 team members, all working on Firefox
• 2 in China, 4 in Miami
• Goal Have a rudimentary SAGE port of Firefox
• Project implementation requirements
• Send Cairo calls to a SAGE display (for graphics)
• Send Pango calls to a SAGE display (for text)
• Mouse and keyboard interface

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Milestones

• (1) Installed and configured SAGE
• (2A) Became familiar with its functionality
• (2B) Became familiar with Firefox build process
• (3A) Ported basic Cairo applications to SAGE
• (3B) Ported Pango text to SAGE
• (4) Ported Firefox to SAGE
• (5) Published paper

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Milestone Timeline

• June 2009 Milestone 1
• July 2009 Milestone 2
• August 2009 Milestone 3
• October 2009 Milestone 4
• November 2009 Milestone 5

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Conclusion

• SAGE is a promising solution for remote
  collaboration
• Quite a bit of work is needed
• An easier way to install would be nice as well

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Thank You

• Questions?