SCD's Darin Oman shoots a digital video of SOARS participants during an AccessGrid session on 22 July 2004. Amber Reynolds, speaking onscreen from Norman, Oklahoma, shares preliminary results of her summer research with her peers in Boulder.

Photo: Lynda Lester, NCAR/SCD

SCD fires up AccessGrid for SOARS protégés

This summer, SCD helped two students in the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program give face-to-face presentations to their peers and mentors — even though they were thousands of miles away.

Amber Reynolds, a SOARS protégé working offsite at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and Atzel Drevon, recovering from a broken leg in Puerto Rico, both joined a SOARS seminar in SCD's Visualization Laboratory at NCAR on 24 June 2004.

They did so via the AccessGrid, an electronic collaboration environment that supports human interaction at a distance. SCD's Visualization Lab is a node on the Access Grid.

An ensemble of network, computing, and other resources, the AccessGrid is a framework developed jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to foster geographically distributed scientific research.

AccessGrid users normally connect via high-bandwidth networks — but Darin Oman, a VisLab operator in SCD's Visualization and Enabling Technologies Section, used special inSORS software to hook up Amber and Atzel via cable modems from their laptops. The experiment was a success — Amber and Atzel presented their research proposals, listened to other presentations, and participated in Q&A with the other protégés.

On 22 July, Darin fired up the AccessGrid again so that Amber could join her peers in sharing preliminary research findings. Atzel, wearing a cast, appeared this time in person.

For more information: Photos and more details on how SCD is sponsoring SOARS in 2004