CONTRACTOR'S PROGRESS STATUS AND MANAGEMENT REPORT HPDST Intelligent Collaboration & Visualization for the period 22 Oct 1996 - 22 Jan 1997 Report #2 CDRL A001 CONTRACT N66001-96-C-8507 13 March 1997 SUBMITTED TO Receiving Officer e-mail address: "hpdstnrad@nosc.mil" Rich Laverty Frank Schindler Bob Medearis 619-553-2918 619-553-2845 619-553-6377 laverty@nosc.mil fschindl@nosc.mil medearis@nosc.mil SUBMITTED BY University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599 Principal Investigator Administrative Contact Contract/Financial Contact Prasun Dewan Sarah Thompson (919) 962-1823 (919) 962-4673 fax: (919) 962-1799 (919) 962-5011 dewan@cs.unc.edu sarah_thompson@unc.edu Do not distribute to DTIC or other data depositories. Distribution authorized to DOD components only; premature dissemination (date). Other requests shall be referred to Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center (NCCOSC), RDT&E Division, San Diego, California 92152-5000. Quarterly Status Report High Performance Distributed Services Technology HPDST Intelligent Collaboration & Visualization for the period 22 July 1996 - 22 October 1996 Contract N66001-96-C-8507 CDRL A001 1.0 Purpose of Report This status report is the quarterly contract deliverable (CDRL A001) which summarizes the effort expended by the University of North Carolina team in support of HPDST Intelligent Collaboration & Visualization (IC&V) on Contract N6601-96-C-8507. 2.0 Project Members UNC/Dewan and others. spent: 1480 hours sub-contractor/ODU. spent: 0 hours sub-contractor/PSU. spent: 0 hours 3.0 Project Description (last modified mm/yy) 4.0 Performance Against Plan Spending was as planned for this reporting period. 5.0 Major Accomplishments to Date In this quarter, we partially completed many of the tasks we started in the previous quarter. Anshu Sharma and Vassil Roussev, in the process of developing a distributed collaborative version of the spreadsheet, identified and solved a subtle problem with integrating the Java Remote Method Invocation and Observer/Observable packages. The problem has to do with the fact that RMI cannot be used directly for interacting with objects of existing Java protocols/classes, and the solution involved creating an extra proxy object at the remote site. They are currently documenting the problem and its solution. Dewan wrote up a strawman design of the reference architecture. It extends the basic model-view view of an interactive components with several other components for supporting collaboration. Currently, it is a very high-level abstract design, and Sharma and Roussev have started a project to make it more concrete it by implementing a simple version of it in a distributed, collaborative spreadsheet. John Smith and Qian Li designed and partly implemented generic Java objects and user-interfaces for persistent graph data structures. They based their design on the user-interface and data models of the ABC graph storage system developed at UNC. They plan to use these objects to encapsulate and interoperate existing ABC graphs, Web nodes, and Unix files/directories. In the area of real-time services, Kevin Jeffay continued worked on the design of a quality-of-service manager for shared, distributed, virtual environments. In collaboration with the Intel Architecture Labs in Hillsboro, OR, graduate students Michele Clark and Peter Nee developed a prototype system in the Intel ProShare(TM) desktop videoconferencing system. The system monitors congestion in the network, feeds this information back to the sender who in turn attempts to adapt the outgoing media streams to ameliorate the effects of network congestion on the application's performance. Experiments using this system across the Internet were begun. The goal is to understand the limits on Rbest effortS real-time communications across the Internet for interactive, collaborative applications. This study will form the basis for the final design of a quality-of-service manager for distributed VEs. A second effort involving Kevin Jeffay and Mark Parris (an IBM Graduate Fellowship holder) is attempting to understand how transport-layer media applications can be applied in the network, in particular in network routers, to further reduce the effects of network congestion. Parris worked on a paper design of such a router. Ultimately he will implement the design by modifying the FreeBSD operating system. 7.0 Issues 7.1 Open issues with no plan, as yet, for resolution: 7.2 Open issues with plan for resolution: As mentioned in the previous report, we had commitment from Mike Meehan, a senior graphics students, to work on the VR aspects of our project. He had planned on joining us in September but could not do so because of delay in shipping the product he was working on. The schedule further slipped and he could not join this period either. We have started looking for another student as a replacement or an addition. 7.3 Issues resolved: 8.0 Near-term Plan To make progress on the efforts started this quarter. 9.0 Completed Travel Dewan and Munson attended the CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) conference and presented their work on concurrency control, 11/16-11/20. 10. Equipment Purchases and Description 11.0 Summary of Activity 11.1 Work Focus: Our focus this quarter was on: initial design of a reference architecture, initial design of Java interface to persistent graph data structures. implementation of a remote Java interface to the Java package for distributing events, integration of real-time sevices in Intel's Proshare environment. 11.2 Significant Events: None this quarter. FINANCIAL INFORMATION: Contract #: N66001-96-C-8507 Contract Period of Performance: 7/22/96-7/21/99 Ceiling Value: $981,697 Reporting Period: 10/22/96 - 01/22/97 Actual Vouchered (all costs to be reported as fully burdened, do not report overhead, GA and fee separately): Current Period Prime Contractor Hours Cost Labor 1480 24,338 ODC's 8,173 Sub-contractor 1 (ODU) 0 0 Sub-contractor 2 (PSU) 0 0 TOTAL: 32,511 Cumulative to date: Prime Contractor Hours Cost Labor 2580 43,239 ODC's 8,835 Sub-contractor 1 (ODU) 0 0 Sub-contractor 2 (PSU) 0 0 TOTAL: 52,074 Notes: ODU was late with its vouchers, hence the no cost assigned to them.