Jay, I'm happy to see progress on this.. I quite interested in understanding how much of the AG environment you can support with one a box system and how reliable it is. --Rick At 02:33 PM 3/15/2001 -0800, Jay Beavers wrote:

Just thought I'd let you know that I'm now running an Access Grid node on a single ~$4500 computer (not counting displays, microphones, cameras) successfully. I've seen 35 QCIF & 3 CIF video streams work great spread across multiple monitors. Some details:

* Hardware

Dell Precision 330 Workstation (Pentium IV/1.4 GHz @ ~70% CPU utilization, 512 MB RAM w/ 155 MB in use) Primary display adapter NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Secondary display adapter Matrox G200 MMS Quad (four analog video outs) 2x Dell LCD panels @ 1600x1200 3x Compaq MP2800 Projectors @ 1024x768 Integrated full duplex audio on motherboard Integrated 100BaseT Ethernet on motherboard Osprey-200 Audio/Video capture card 3x free PCI slots (2x PCI, 1x AGP in use) El-cheapo microphone Sony S-Video camera

* Software

Windows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 1 & Windows Updates applied Osprey-200 drivers v1.52 Access Grid Virtual Venue 2000-1219 software Stock VIC v2.8ucl-1.1.3-win32 (necessary to enable send & receive on one machine, AG VIC has send disabled) Stock RAT v4.2.13 Multicast Beacon v0.63

* Changes from standard Access Grid 2000-1219 installation

Added stock VIC & RAT to add video send & audio send/receive to one box Moved all services to one Windows 2000 computer Applied Internet Explorer MIME associations for AG components (previously sent to this list) Modified start-beacon.bat to use "jview ..." instead of "java ..." to work with MS VM native to Windows 2000

* Issues uncovered during testing

Pre-Beta 2 Windows XP (next release of Windows 2000) incompatible with RAT send (RAT receives just fine)

* Work moving forward

Investigating interoperable, more efficient Windows client applications based on DirectShow and TAPI functionality included in Windows 2000 & Windows XP Investigating improving video quality & system efficiency using different codecs like MPEG-4, MSVideo, & MSAudio Investigating improved CPU efficiency with new Pentium-IV optimized codecs Investigating software echo cancellation (part of upcoming Windows XP release) Investigating fault tolerant multicast RTP video transport Future integration work pending discussions with AG team @ ANL

FYI, I'll be out of office next week and not very responsive to questions about this setup while offsite.

- jcb