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Again, most initiatives happened in the Emerging Technologies space during the past year; note the changes from last year's initiatives and project highlights. Initiatives and projects have become much more focused and streamlined, and have their respective "production homes" in other areas of ASET as well as ITS. Much of ET's mission is to investigate new information technologies to determine how and if further investigation and/or prototyping is warranted. The projects noted below reflect ET's primary efforts during 2004 - 2005.
This year, ET built a prototype batch-render facility using a mixture of Linux and Mac OSX servers. The facility was made available for testing in fall 2004. Interest in the facility has been low and toward the end of the year, this project was moved to inactive status.
However, many other high-end imaging software packages (Vue5, Bryce, Final Cut Studio, etc.), do have their own network-rendering capabilities, and though they are not as extensive nor elaborate as a "rendering farm", ET is actively pursuing these utilities. A greater interest for ET in this space is to provide more general relief to long-running desktop programs via a Grid-like service that is interactive rather than batch-oriented. At minimum, such a service would need to run a variety of existing applications normally running on a desktop workstation in a lab or classroom environment.
Details related to this initiative:
As a proof of concept, ET produced a complex animation demo clip, using Maya, Final Cut, After Effects, Audacity, and Photoshop to demonstrate that a major Hollywood studio is no longer required in order to begin studying and using high-end animation and modeling tools. This clip was shown at this year's "Take Our Sons And Daughters to Work Day," where it was the most popular of the ITS presentations, and introduced many families and prospective students to the field of digital arts.
During fall 2004, the College of Arts and Architecture faculty expressed interest in developing a seminar introducing digital media technologies. Since then, the staff of Educational Technology Services (ETS) in Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), a unit of ITS, have become interested in the topic and seem to be a more viable partner for future developments of this initiative.
ET staff provided a series of articles for every issue of the widely-read Academic Computing newsletter on animation and rendering. These articles have been well-received both within ITS and throughout the University. Many readers have been introduced to this topic for the first time via this series.
One of the first obstacles ET encountered during 2004 was that the entire field of animation and rendering has not been embraced by large segments of Penn State's academic community, though interest has been expressed. Student interest in this topic is high, and presents a challenge for departments to fulfill. The Newsletter articles are one small way of addressing this issue; however, ET staff are pursuing more formal educational channels as well. ET plans to organize and offer a series of informal seminars during the spring 2006 semester, in concert with other ITS units. Hopefully, the lessons learned during this experience will lead to a more structured round of training, under the auspices of the ITS Training Group.
ET also is actively involved with the product-development teams of several major software vendors in designing and refining new imaging products. Animation, rendering, and 3-D modeling are tightly connected to advances in software, while hardware continues to drop in price while rising in speed and capacity. New software packages with which ET has gained experience (and provided feedback to vendors) during this year include:
- Maya 6: Considered the workhorse of the animation industry.
- Vue 5: A very promising new environmental simulation package from e-on software.
- Final Cut Studio: A drastically upgraded all-in-one professional-level expansion of the former Final Cut Pro.
- DAZ Studio: A unique approach to animation and rendering for the masses, a software tool that integrates smoothly with e frontier's Poser. With an interface based largely upon Maya, this tool (still in beta at this writing) could bring affordable and photo-real output to a new segment of the commercial and artistic market.
- Zbrush: A new 3-D modeling tool now being taught at the Gnomon Workshops and rapidly becoming the modeler of choice for major studios.
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Apple Computer has maintained its traditional lead in the Animation and Rendering field, and accordingly ET has maintained strong contacts with Apple representatives. This year, ET staff participated in the OSX Tiger Beta program and attended the Apple World Wide Developer Conference. ET predicts that Apple's shift to Intel processors will have a strong impact in the 3-D modeling field, and feel well-positioned to explore these new avenues. In particular, staff are actively providing feedback to Apple on the need for OS-integrated distributed processing.
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The objective of this initiative is to develop a platform that could be used by a novice employing a graphical user interface (GUI) to provide applications and services available on competing operating system platforms. Last year, Mandrake Linux and RedHat Enterprise Linux were tested. This year, ET added SUSE Linux Professional to the test suite and tried the latest RedHat Workstation and Fedora. SUSE seemed to be the most polished of the test products. In addition, it was able to recognize and configure the dual-band WiFi card in a ThinkPad laptop. Automated system maintenance is a for-fee service and seemed to work well for RedHat and SUSE. The RedHat AS and SUSE Professional distributions with the 2.6 Kernel seemed to be step forward toward better ease-of-use. Pending a considerable change, this project is moving to inactive status.
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Penn State is participating, along with the University of Washington, Cornell University, and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, in the federal government's eAuthentication Initiative. The first phase of this involvement included an on-site credential assessment of Penn State's identity management system. Stephen Sill and Sharon Terango of the eAuthentication Initiative met with representatives from Security Operations and Services (SOS), Consulting and Support Services (CSS), and ASET to assess the various components of Penn State's identity management system. They provided the University with a detailed checklist complete with suggestions for best practices, as defined by the federal government eAuthentication agency. The assessment results of the four universities were used to create a Gap Analysis document that determined the possibility of higher education meeting the federal government's requirements for credential providers.
As a follow-up to this credential assessment, the universities have entered into a pilot along with NSF to use Shibboleth to access FastLane. FastLane is an application used by faculty at Penn State to submit grant proposals and follow the proposal through the approval process. The goal of this project is a proof-of-concept for managing the trust agreements between higher education institutions and federal government agencies. This pilot project will require each university to join the federal government federation. The long-term goal is to provide a trust relationship between InCommon and the federal government federation rather than require each university to join both federations. An Interfederation Interoperability Working Group has been created to determine the feasibility and direction for this interfederation trust. This group has written a charter and defined the deliverables targeted for a September 2005 deadline.
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ET worked with Applied Information Technologies (AIT) in ASET to design and prototype a system to allow guests at Penn State to access ITS' wireless networks. Friends of Penn State (FPS) accounts can be issued to those outside of the Penn State environment to access ITS wireless networks and services. Specficially, the prototype was implemented and used during the Common Solutions Group (CSG) annual spring meeting, hosted by Penn State. It was technically successful and well-received by those who attended the conference.
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ET continued to work on the Mellon Foundation-funded Lionshare Project. ET has created a new Certification Authority, the SASL-CA, which issues short-term certificates to use with valid credentials. The SASL-CA has the potential to accept credentials in a variety of formats, however, only Kerberos is supported at this time. The ET LionShare Team created the SAML-based LionShare Security Profile, which makes use of short-term certificates issued by a SASL-CA. Additional work is underway to build a LionShare module for the Shibboleth Attribute Authority, in order to allow for self retrieval of attributes with Holder-of-Key confirmation.
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ET is currently working with WPSX and the University of Washington to develop the capability to use IP networks to transport high-quality audio/video with a particular eye on high definition (HD) video. ET plans to take advantage of National LambdaRail (NLR) to support the high bandwidths necessary for uncompressed HD transport to other NLR sites. One of the outcomes of this effort should be a "crash cart" so that people at Penn State can sign out to stream their own events. ET's first practical application was to provide high-quality multicast streaming of THON 2005 as well as provide a special unicast stream to Hershey Medical Center so that patients and families who could not travel to THON could watch the events. Multimedia streaming experts in AIT provided technical assistance by configuring the hardware devices and testing the stream prior to going live.
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ET has been working with AIT to provide authenticated and authorized access to Web sites that utilize the Penn State Access Account infrastructure. Specifically, ET is seeking alternatives to the Entegrity Security Adapter in a Microsoft IIS environment while still providing GUI-based access control. The Security Adapter is no longer being developed by the vendor and it is dependent on the Penn State DCE realm, which is being phased out in favor of Kerberos 5. Some success has been achieved using WebAccess and Microsoft URL Authorization in conjunction with a local authorization database. A combination of WebAccess, Microsoft URL Authorization, and Shibboleth also provides these services while using attributes in Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), otherwise known as Penn State Directory Services, for authorization decisions. However, some script writing will be necessary in order for Microsoft's URL Authorization to make authorization decisions.
Further work is being done with Digital Library Technologies (DLT), a unit of ITS, to enable EZProxy to use WebAccess for authentication to library resources. The WebAccess production server is managed and overseen exclusively by AIT. ET's primary role in this project is to focus on integration with other systems.
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ET is actively participating in the Internet2 SALSA-NetAuth Working Group and the SALSA Federated Wireless NetAuth Sub-Group.
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ET continues to participate with the Internet2 Middleware community with regard to the testing and development of Shibboleth. In addition to the eAuthentication work with FastLane, ET has submitted various patches to improve security, completed work to enable Shibboleth and WebAccess to work together, and is currently engaged in development to allow LionShare to query the Shibboleth Identity Provider component. Further work is taking place with University Library third-party vendors to use Shibboleth as a replacement for the IP-based authentication currently in use. ET is actively engaged with the ANGEL team and the World University Network (WUN) to provide an authentication/authorization solution to allow the inter-institutional and international sharing of online resources among students and faculty. ET also continues to take part in conversations with partners such as Thomson Publishing, Turn-It-In, and Napster to promote the use of Shibboleth and preservation of privacy. For additional details regarding the production arm of Shibboleth, managed by AIT, please see the information about Shibboleth in the New, Improved, and Continued section of this annual report.
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ET continues to investigate the use of software, in particular Web-enabled software, to facilitate collaboration, communication, and the creation of online communities. This past year, staff in ET have developed or integrated three major types of Social Software: Personal Weblogs (blogs), Group Weblogs, and editable Web sites known as Wikis.
ET's cLog group blogging software, which is in use on the SlashET Web site, has been deployed in several other places. Among these is a very successful deployment in Educational Technology Services (ETS) within TLT. cLog is being used to retain institutional knowledge and facilitate communications during leadership transition. Instructional Designers in ETS have made suggestions for several useful enhancements to cLog which were merged into the SlashET site.
In addition, development continues on individual/personal Weblog solutions for pedagogical and extracurricular uses. The personal blog will facilitate personal expression and encourage commentary on the work of others.
ET is investigating the use of Wikis for collaborative Web work. In doing so, they have found Wikis to be very useful tools for creating documents and documentation authored by more than one person. In particular, ET is using a MediaWiki Wiki to facilitate the creation of content for the ET Web site and for annual report submissions. The current focus is integrating the Penn State Access Account infrastructure into the security infrastructure of a Wiki and publishing documents out of the Wiki to a live Web site.
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ET's storage solutions investigation occurred on two fronts: filesystem alternatives and block storage over Internet Protocol (e.g. iSCSI) testing. On the filesystem front, replacements for the DCE/DFS enterprise filesystem were investigated. OpenAFS and NFSv4 were tested on AIX, Solaris, and Linux and compared to a filesystem replacement feature list. There are missing features in both cases, but an assessment will be made to determine which features are requirements and which are optional. ET and AIT continue to use iSCSI protocol equipment to provide magnetic tape block I/O over existing IP networks rather than new dedicated fiber. Copies of vital backup information are written to a remotely located tape storage device to insure data redundancy as part of an overall storage disaster recovery plan.
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ET has been experimenting with various aspects of Voice over IP (VoIP) to test open source systems as well as integration with other modes of communication. A small prototype of an open source VoIP system (Asterisk) with connectivity to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) has been developed. The prototype system allows ET staff to place calls to anywhere from non-traditional voice devices such laptop computers and IP-attached handheld devices. ET also tested e-mail notification of voice mail in a test Unity Voice Mail system.
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ET is actively involved in the ITS Wireless Committee's development and product selection for the next-generation ITS wireless model. The committee is currently testing and evaluating equipment. Please refer to Wireless Updates and Initiatives in the New, Improved, and Continued section of this annual report.
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Last revised: Monday, November 14, 2005.