Things I've been doing...
CAVE Video
One of the projects involves the CAVE, invented at The Electronic Visualization Laboratory at University of Illinois at Chicago. Actually there are multiple parts to the projects that involve the CAVE. Last time I was working at Argonne, Mike Papka, Bob Olson and I got live video running into the CAVE being mapped onto this little box as a texture map. It was wild, you could turn the TV inside out!
CAVE Video leads to Tele-presence
The CAVE is a tool used to create immersive virtual reality applications. We are in the process of building applications that will enable tele-operations, first of simple video playback robots, and later of more complex machinery or robotic hardware.
Multicasting
Multicasting is basically a protocal extension somewhere in between broadcasts(to every host), and unicast(to one host). The idea is that you have a group of hosts that reside on an IP address, the addresses start at 224.0.0.0. Then you speak to that single IP address, and all the hosts in the group get your packets. There is a faq for multicasting, and the sotware is spread among a few different places. Here are the canonical places that I look:
Just recently there was a post to the mbone mailing list about this software I happened to pick up. The software watches traffic on a network interface and shows the distribution across protocols, it's called ipwatch. I'm calling the one I've got version 1.3, if you add to it I'd appreciate diffs, so I can integrate them, eventuallly this will be what I call 'real software', or something. Maybe I'll rewrite it in Python, heh.
Constellation
Constellation is a project I worked on with Ken Fox. It's a raytracer, based on the Persistance of Vision raytracer that incorporates the Message Passing Interface, by using MPI we've been able to spread the raytracing process across multiple machines.