Science at the Speed of Thought - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 5

the application or device uses an appropriate private protocol, unique to each
application or device.
Although a JavaSpace is not expected to store objects that include large
volumes of data, such as Gigabyte output and input files typically used in large
experiments, it can be used to coordinate access to such files. An object in the
space can represent such a file, giving status information about the file such as
size and time written and allowing for the retrieval of the file contents over the
network. A Remote File service (RFS) has been developed to handle this need
in the VL. Applications can read and write large files within the VL if they need
them to be available, normally for visualization and for feedback in the case of
experiment input files.
The looseness of the coordination framework, together with the use of Java-
Spaces, Java and Jini provides the communication fabric of the VL robustness
and generality. Implementing this way means it is easy to include things. Thus
it also provides speed of implementation.
This Jini/JavaSpace based remote file service was developed as part of a
related project, Screen Saver Science (SSS) [14], which provides a distributed
computing environment for general scientific computing. In SSS, applications
utilize otherwise idle processors to complete compute-intensive tasks within a
distributed algorithm and use RFS for large remote file input and output. As
with the participants in the VL, machines participating in SSS can join in the
SSS system to compute tasks at any time and can leave at any time without
disrupting the overall operation of SSS. Although this is called Screen Saver
Science, there is actually no screen saver application within SSS, but screen
savers are sometimes used to help determine when to join SSS and when to
leave (other techniques are also used).

2.2 Immersive Visualization Environment

The second component of our VL is an immersive visualization (IV) environment
(IVE). IVE is widely used across government, industry, and academia [15]. It is
also increasingly used to great advantage in scientific visualization [16, 17, 1].
“By immersive virtual reality we mean technology that gives the user the
psychophysical experience of being surrounded by a virtual, that is, computer-
generated, environment. This experience is elicited with a combination of hard-
ware, software, and interaction devices. Immersion is typically produced by a
stereo 3D visual display, which uses head tracking to create a human-centric
rather than a computer-determined point of view [16].” Thus, users interact
with “things rather than pictures of things [18]” because the three dimensional
data models reside in the same physical space that the user occupies. This en-
ables the user to move around and to view the objects from different angles,
to understand physical relationships in an natural way, and to interact directly
with the objects in the environment in much the same way that he or she would
inspect an apparatus or a sample in the laboratory. Of course, in a virtual en-
vironment, the user is not limited to normal physical interactions. Objects in
the immersive environment are completely mutable; the user can make objects