UltraGrid
A High Definition Collaboratory

The goals of the UltraGrid project are to enhance the state of the art in high quality, large scale, telepresence systems and to enable flexible and ad-hoc remote collaboration.

The UltraGrid video conferencing system enables high-definition (HD) interactive video conferencing with minimal latency. UltraGrid, supports full rate uncompressed HD video at over 1.2 Gbps. In combination with AccessGrid, UltraGrid provides a complete HD video conferencing experience, utilizing AccessGrid's venue server infrastructure and audio services.

The UltraGrid system can also be utilized as a general purpose HD data distribution system. UltraGrid nodes convert SMTPE 292M high-definition video signals into RTP/UDP/IP packets which can then be distributed across a variety of network infrastructures. UltraGrid's architecture seeks to minimize system induced latency. This enables UltraGrid to be utilized for a variety of real-time applications which are latency sensitive such as video conferencing and real-time interactive 3D visualization.

For uncompressed HD, UltraGrid operates in two different modes: one at just under 1 Gbps (for environments limited to 1 Gbps transport) and another at full rate HD mode of over 1.2 Gbps. UltraGrid also supports video compression schemes, including standard definition Digital Video (DV) and Motion JPEG. For hardware specifications and software download, see below.

Publications and Standards Contributions

• Alvaro Saurin, Congestion Control for Video-conferencing Applications, MSc Thesis, University of Glasgow, December 2006.
• Ladan Gharai, Tom Lehman, Alvaro Saurin and Colin Perkins, “Experiences with High Definition Interactive Video Conferencing”, Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), Toronto, Canada, July 2006.
• Colin Perkins and Ladan Gharai, “RTP and the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol”, Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), Toronto, Canada, July 2006.
• Colin Perkins and Ladan Gharai, “Holographic and 3D Teleconferencing and Visualization: Implications for Terabit Networked Applications”, Proceedings of the Infocom 2006 High-Speed Networking Workshop: The Terabits Challenge, Barcelona, Spain, April 2006.
• Colin Perkins, “RTP Payload Format for Uncompressed Video: Additional Colour Sampling Modes”, February 2006, RFC 4421.
• Ladan Gharai and Colin Perkins, “RTP Payload Format for Uncompressed Video”, Internet Engineering Task Force, September 2005, RFC 4175.
• Colin Perkins, “Building Adaptive Applications: On The Need For Congestion Control”, Invited paper presented at the 17th SPIE/IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, USA, January 2005.
• Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins and Tom Lehman, “Packet Reordering, High Speed Networks and Transport Protocol Performance”, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN'04),Chicago, IL, USA, October 2004.
• Ladan Gharai and Colin Perkins, “Real-time Collaborative Environments and the Grid”, Proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Collaborative Environments (WACE'04), Nice, France, September 2004.
• Peter Bellows, Jaroslav Flidr, Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins, Pawel Chodowiec & Kris Gaj, “IPsec-Protected Transport of HDTV over IP”, 13th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2003. Reprinted in P. Lysaght & W. Rosentiel, “New Algorithms, Architectures and Applications for Reconfigurable Computing”, Springer, 2005, ISBN 1-4020-3127-0.
• Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins, Gary Goncher and Allison Mankin, “RTP Payload Format for Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) 292M Video”, Internet Engineering Task Force, RFC 3497, March 2003.
• Ladan Gharai and Colin Perkins, “Implementing Congestion Control in the Real World”, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Lausanne, Switzerland, August 2002.
• Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins and Allison Mankin, “Large Group Teleconferencing: Techniques and Considerations”, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Internet Computing, Las Vegas, NV, USA, June 2002.
• Colin Perkins, Ladan Gharai, Tom Lehman and Allison Mankin, “Experiments with Delivery of HDTV over IP Networks”, Proceedings of the 12th International Packet Video Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, April 2002.

Related Publications

• Petr Holub, Ludek Matyska, Milos Liska, Lukas Hejtmanek, Jiri Denemark, Tomas Rebok, Ravi Paruchuri, Jan Radil and Eva Hladka, High-definition multimedia for multiparty low-latency interactive communication, Future Generation Computer Systems, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Elsevier Science, The Nederlands. ISSN 0167-739X, 2006, vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 856-861.
• Andrei Hutanu, Gabrielle Allen, Stephen D. Beck, Petr Holub, Hartmut Kaiser, Archit Kulshrestha, Milos Liska, Jon MacLaren, Ludek Matyska, Ravi Paruchuri, Steffen Prohaska, Ed Seidel, Brygg Ullmer and Shalini Venkataraman, Distributed and collaborative visualization of large data sets using high-speed networks, Future Generation Computer Systems, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Elsevier Science, The Nederlands. ISSN 0167-739X, 2006, vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 1004-1010.

Talks and Demonstrations

• Photographs from a Demonstration at the SuperComputing 2005 conference in Seattle, November 2005.
• Ladan Gharai, “Putting the “Ultra” in UltraGrid: Full rate Uncompressed HDTV Video Conferencing”, Presentation to the 20th Asia-Pacific Advanced Network meeting, Taipei, Taiwan, August 2005.
• Ladan Gharai, “Full rate Uncompressed HDTV Transport: Experiences and Implementation”, Presentation to the 19th Asia-Pacific Advanced Network meeting, Bangkok, Thailand, February 2005.
• Demonstration at the SuperComputing 2004 conference in Pittsburgh, November 2004.
• Ladan Gharai, “Uncompressed HD Video Streaming with Congestion Control”, Presentation to the 18th Asia-Pacific Advanced Network meeting, Cairns, Australia, July 2004.
• Colin Perkins, “Congestion Control for High Performance Networked Multimedia”, Seminar at the Hamilton Institute, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland, January 2004.
• Presentation and demonstration for PBS, ISI East, November 2002.
• Demonstration at the SuperComputing 2002 conference in Baltimore, November 2002.

Technology Transfer

UltraGrid's technology had been adopted by other HDTV enthusiasts. This includes the CESNET group at the Masaryk University in Brno and the HDTV group at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). If you are also using the UltraGrid technology, let us know!

The CESNET group recently demonstrated HD Multipoint Conferencing with UltraGrid at iGrid 2005. In this demonstration, low latency high-definition video and audio were used to create a "near to immersive" environment across continents over optical networks. For more information see here.

Software Download

Source code for the UltraGrid system is available for download under a BSD-style license, and should run on recent Linux, FreeBSD and MacOS X systems with supported video capture and display hardware, and appropriate network connection.

UltraGrid is primarily an HDTV video conferencing system, although starting with v0.4 we also support DV video. To use the HDTV conferencing features of UltraGrid, you need an HDTV camera with SMPTE-292M output (we use a Philips LDK-6000), an HDTV video capture card (DVS HDstationOEM or Centaurus), an HDTV capable display, and high performance hosts to act as sender and receiver connected by a network supporting at least one gigabit per second sustained transfer rates (1.5Gbps preferred). To sustain video capture and network transmission at HDTV rates sender and receiver hosts should have a dual 64 bit/66 MHz PCI bus architecture (or better) with gigabit or ten gigabit Ethernet. Performance is very sensitive to details of the motherboard and PCI configuration; please ask on our mailing list for advice.

Starting with version v0.4, UltraGrid also supports DV cameras attached via FireWire connections, as a lower quality alternative. There are no special system requirements for DV conferencing, other than a consumer DV camcorder connected by FireWire.

Contacts and Mailing List

The UltraGrid project is a collaboration between the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California and the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.

The UltraGrid users mailing list exists as a forum for discussion of the UltraGrid system. This is a public mailing list, and anyone with an interest is encouraged to subscribe.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 0230738. The UltraGrid software is based on earlier work funded by DARPA IPTO under contract #MDA972-99-C-0022. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or the United States Government.

This product includes software developed by the Computer Science Department at University College London, by the Computer Systems Engineering Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and by Akimichi Ogawa. This product uses the RSA Data Security, Inc. MD5 Message Digest Algorithm.

Copyright © 2002-2005 University of Southern California
Copyright © 2003-2005 University of Glasgow