Parallel@Illinois kicks off SC09 Exhibit with Tele-Immersive Lightsaber Duels

November 6, 2009
By: Cheri Helregel

SC09 guests visiting Parallel@Illinois (Booth #1007) and NCSA (Booth #1216) during the exhibition can "duke it out" — Star Wars style — in a virtual, tele-immersive environment.

This fun-filled demo is possible with the help of the Illinois-developed TEEVE: Tele-Immersive Environment for EVErybody. TEEVE supports real-time collaborative physical activities among multiple, geographically distributed sites. Each site is equipped with multiple cameras that create 3D images of the participants in a virtual environment, thus allowing them to interact in that environment.

At SC09, participants at each site (in this case, booth) will engage in a friendly lightsaber duel with each other — via TEEVE magic. The duels take place during Monday's opening gala and most of the day Tuesday.

The TEEVE project, led by Illinois computer science professor Klara Nahrstedt, is a great example of the types of human-centric applications that drive research at the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at Illinois (UPCRC Illinois). Last year, Intel and Microsoft funded the establishment of UPCRC Illinois with the goal of bringing parallel computing to mainstream consumer applications.

In addition to the TEEVE lightsaber duels, Parallel@Illinois will feature two other hands-on demonstrations, and a video highlighting research and activities that give insight into Illinois' continuing leadership at the frontiers of parallel computing.

On Wednesday morning, Jeff Overbey will demonstrate and discuss Photran, an open-source IDE and refactoring tool for Fortran. Later that afternoon, Reza Farivar will demonstrate and discuss MITHRA: a cluster platform for scalable GPGPU utilization. Both will return again on Thursday with MITHRA in the morning and Photran in the afternoon.

For more information about research and projects featured in the Parallel@Illinois booth or to find out how you can engage with Illinois' parallel computing experts during the SC09 Technical Program, visit:

• Parallel@Illinois Booth at SC09 - #1007
• Illinois participation in the SC09 Technical Program

Interviews, quotes, and/or media inquiries may be directed to:

Cheri Helregel
Email: chelrege@illinois.edu
Office: 217.265.6329
Cell: 217.714.7200

About Parallel@Illinois

Parallel@Illinois has been pioneering and promoting parallel computing research and education for over four decades. Current efforts include the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, a global Cloud Computing Testbed, a CUDA Center of Excellence, a Center for Extreme Scale Computation, the Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing, an OpenSPARC Center of Excellence, and the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center. For more information about parallel computing at Illinois, please visit www.parallel.illinois.edu.