By Elina Shatkin, December 7, 2004
AJA announced that its XENA HD card was used by ResearchChannel in a demonstration of two-way, uncompressed 1080i video conferencing between three locations: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (in Intel's booth at SC04), Seattle, Washington (at University of Washington (UW), and Canberra, Australia (offices of AARNet (Australia's Research and Education Network). A XENA HD card was in each location, installed in personal computers running on Microsoft Windows XP for both HD input and output.
This demonstration is a follow-up of ResearchChannel's experiments at Internet2 in Austin, TX, in October, the results of which led to the demonstrations at SC04. At SC04, attendees were able to use the technology that makes high quality HD videoconferencing possible at higher speed, over Internet networks of greater distance with low latency, and speak to Seattle and Canberra locations from the show floor.
Audio and video were of unsurpassed quality from both locations with fully interactive communication sessions between the locations. The demos used eight Intel computers (four at SC04 and two at both Seattle and Canberra), each with a XENA board installed and the latest Intel PCI Express bus and were supplied by Silicon Mechanics in Seattle.
Between Pittsburgh and Seattle, the Internet was a dedicated portion of ResearchChannel member National LambdaRail's (NLR) network
. NLR is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications, over a nationwide optical fiber infrastructure.
The Australian connection took advantage of through AARnet's newly completed Pacific Ocean fibre network, supplied by the Southern Cross Cable Network and was the inaugural transmission. AARNet provides high-capacity, cost-effective Internet services to the education and research communities and their research partners in Australia and is a member of ResearchChannel. The network went from Canberra through Sydney through Hawaii to Seattle.
The demo at SC04 utilized about 6 Gigabits/sec between Pittsburgh and Seattle on the NLR network, while the leg between Seattle and Canberra on the AARNet network was about 3 Gigabits/second because some of the video originated in Seattle. Traffic from Canberra and UW to Pittsburgh went through Pacific Northwest Gigapop, which is the point of presence for major networks in the Pacific Northwest and is run by UW and ResearchChannel.
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