With a few seconds to spare, and its people and its people’s people on tenterhooks, IBM Corp’s press conference about a press conference – in essence a technology demonstration of I-WAY, or Information Wide AreaYear – sprang into life last Wednesday and saved any Blue blushes. IBM and project partner Argonne National Laboratory held an interactive press conference over the Internet between sites in New York and Supercomputing ’95 in San Diego. With a 100Mbps AT&T Corp Asynchronous Transfer Mode network under the hood, the demonstration included an interactive question-and-answer session over a live video link, plus recording and playback of stored clips. Some 16 other sites were plugged into the streams. Eight IBM RS/6000 SP2 nodes attached to a 500Gb RAID subsystem served up a single system via IBM’s Vulcan High Performance Switch to a further 20 SP2s. The SP2s were running a new enabling technology called Tigershark, described as a parallel file system built on Unix which extracts video from disk and readies it for delivery across the network at 30 frames per second using Real Time Protocol, eliminating the usual jerky movements associated with digital video. As well as participating in the development of Tigershark, Argonne co-developed other software-enabling ‘glue’ including C and C++ parallel scripting languages for Tigershark to tie the various IBM components together and put the material out across the Internet, including stream feeders, catalogue server and stream writers. IBM used AIX client systems running a California Institute of Technology-developed browser to front-end the session but expects in future that anyone with a 1Mbps (two-thirds T1 speed) or better connection – which includes ISDN – plus a Unix, Windows or Mac browser supporting video decomposition could make use of the service. IBM plans to begin rolling out the architecture on pilot SP2 sites next year. Rather than buying all the components of what’s a multi-million dollar set-up, organisations will rent application server space from IBM to conduct Internet-based conferences and meetings. IBM says it is already in talks with a bunch of cable and network providers. Does it sound like a souped-up version of one of the current crop of personal computer and Mac desktop video technologies that support the Cornell CU-SeeMe reflector? The key difference, according to IBM, is scalability. Tigershark can support up 300 simultaneous streams: it’s a sophisticated multimedia player that provides live video feeds, recording and playback, asserts IBM. Try doing that on your Mac.
