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The Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS) is a homogeneous wide-area distributed system consisting of four cluster computers at different locations. DAS has been used for research on communication software, parallel languages and programming systems, schedulers, parallel applications, and distributed applications. The paper gives a preview of the most interesting research results obtained so far in the DAS project.

Current web-based collaboration systems, such as Google Hangouts, WebEx, and Skype, primarily enable single users to work with remote collaborators through video conferencing and desktop mirroring. The original SAGE software, developed in 2004 and adopted at over one hundred international sites, was designed to enable groups to work in front of large shared displays in order to solve problems that required juxtaposing large volumes of information in ultra highresolution. We have developed SAGE2, as a complete redesign and implementation of SAGE, using cloud-based and web browser technologies in order to enhance data intensive colocated and remote collaboration. This paper provides an overview of SAGE2's infrastructure, the technical design challenges, and the afforded benefits to data intensive collaboration. Lastly, we provide insight on how future collaborative applications can be developed to support large displays and demonstrate the power and flexibility that SAGE2 offers in collaborative scenarios through a series of use cases.

The CAVE, a walk-in virtual reality environment typically consisting of 4–6 3 m-by-3 m sides of a room made of rear-projected screens, was first conceived and built in 1991. In the nearly two decades since its conception, the supporting technology has improved so that current CAVEs are much brighter, at much higher resolution, and have dramatically improved graphics performance. However, rear-projection-based CAVEs typically must be housed in a 10 m-by-10 m-by-10 m room (allowing space behind the screen walls for the projectors), which limits their deployment to large spaces. The CAVE of the future will be made of tessellated panel displays, eliminating the projection distance, but the implementation of such displays is challenging. Early multi-tile, panel-based, virtual-reality displays have been designed, prototyped, and built for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. New means of image generation and control are considered key contributions to the future viability of the CAVE as a virtual-reality device.

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