virtuality and efficiency – overcoming past antinomy in the
TRANSCRIPT
Journal of Physics Conference Series
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Virtuality and efficiency ndash overcoming pastantinomy in the remote collaboration experienceTo cite this article Joao Fernandes et al 2010 J Phys Conf Ser 219 082006
View the article online for updates and enhancements
Related contentCollaborative tools and the LHC Somesuccess some plansSteven Goldfarb
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Experience from the 1st Year running aMassive High Quality VideoconferencingService for the LHCJoao Fernandes Thomas Baron andBruno Bompastor
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CMS Centres Worldwide ndash a NewCollaborative InfrastructureLucas Taylor
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Recent citationsExperience from the 1st Year running aMassive High Quality VideoconferencingService for the LHCJoao Fernandes et al
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Tier-2 System Administration AComprehensive ApproachJ Bland et al
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Indico A Collaboration HubP Ferreira et al
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This content was downloaded from IP address 21122446133 on 12102021 at 1225
Virtuality and Efficiency - Overcoming Past Antinomy in the
Remote Collaboration Experience
Joao Fernandes1 Knut Bjorkli David Martin Clavo Thomas Baron
CERN IT-UDS-AVC 1211 Geneva 23 Switzerland
E-mail JoaoFernandescernch
Abstract Several recent initiatives have been put in place by the CERN IT Department to
improve the user experience in remote dispersed meetings and remote collaboration at large in
the LHC communities worldwide We will present an analysis of the factors which were
historically limiting the efficiency of remote dispersed meetings and describe the consequent
actions which were undertaken at CERN to overcome these limitations After giving a status
update of the different equipment available at CERN to enable the virtual sessions and the
various collaborative tools which are currently proposed to users we will focus on the
evolution of this market how can the new technological trends (among others HD
videoconferencing Telepresence Unified Communications etc) impact positively the user
experience and how to attain the best usage of them Finally by projecting ourselves in the
future we will give some hints as to how to answer the difficult question of selecting the next
generation of collaborative tools which set of tools among the various offers (systems like
Vidyo H264 SVC next generation EVO Groupware offers standard H323 systems etc) is
best suited for our environment and how to unify this set for the common user This will finally
allow us to definitively overcome the past antinomy between virtuality and efficiency
1 Introduction
In 2007 the RCTF board (Remote Collaboration Task Force) was formed in response to
recommendations of the LCG RTAG 12 Final Report [3] The RTAG 12 has recommended several
actions considered critical for the future of the collaborative tools in the LHC Perhaps the most
important one was to centralize the coordination of the remote collaborative activities under CERN IT
with oversight from the LHC experiments Since then RCTF has overseen the progress at CERN
effectively implementing most of the key recommendations This has included the signing of service-
level agreements by ATLAS and CMS and specifying the installation and support of conference
facilities at CERN Much of the deployment and installation work is now complete the attention is
shifting toward other challenges including service and infrastructure consolidation and central
application support by CERNIT The author will summarize a few of the successful implementations
of the new policy and developments before pointing out the new challenges and directions to focus in
the near future
2 Progress Achieved amp Current Status
21 Organization
1 To whom any correspondence should be addressed
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
ccopy 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd 1
The most important outcome of the initiatives described above was the creation of an organizational
body at CERN responsible for the design planning development and maintenance of collaborative
tool facilities and services for the LHC CERN IT-UDS-AVC was identified as this body with
oversight from the collaborations provided via the RCTF With this scheme in place significant
progress was made on several fronts This has included videoconferencing facilities Web casting and
Web Lecturing systems integrated environments and web-based authentication and authorization
representing progress basically on every major recommendation of the RTAG 12 final document This
effort is seen as an excellent example of strong coordination and cooperation between CERN IT and
the Experiments The facilities were installed following a specification that was taking into
consideration such key factors as the lighting and sound characteristics of the rooms common use
cases documentation central management support and maintenance capabilities in order to achieve a
specified standard to be replicated site wide
22 Videoconferencing Facilities
The video conferencing hardware agreements between CERN IT and the Experiments required some
time and effort by all parties involved However as soon as the agreements have been reached the
way for serious progress was opened In 2008 only 21 new meeting rooms and auditoria commonly
used by the LHC Experiments were equipped for high-quality audio and video conferencing for a total
of 35 standard videoconferencing rooms on site Agreements have been reached not only with the two
biggest Experiments (ATLAS and CMS) but also with the majority of CERN Departments (AB AT
DSU Directorate IT etc) which allowed to fully standardize the whole infrastructure A complete list
of facilities (constantly updated) their equipment and status is available via the CERN IT-UDS-AVC
web pages [12]
The installed endpoints take advantage of the latest videoconferencing technology on the market
supporting H323 and SIP protocols all of them supporting phone and video connections High-
Definition flat screens are employed for the videoconferencing endpoints with projectors displaying
the presentation material in a large format for local andor remote viewing Audio is transmitted via
microphones using high quality echo suppression systems (built-in the codecs) for best audio quality
Figure 1 Standard videoconferencing room at Point 1 (ATLAS)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
2
A significant number of tests were performed under a variety of conditions to assure best-quality
audio for both audio only and videoconference sessions User input was obtained and evaluated The
development team put a serious effort on monitoring and reviewing data from meetings held in pilot
rooms before designing the final standard configuration to be employed and replicated All facilities
are documented with user guides available on the Web and printed in the rooms
Tutorials are available online and on-site training is provided by direct requests or through the
official CERN Training Catalogue [25] Although several meeting conveners are running many
meetings in an autonomous way any user are welcome to request assistance and training for meetings
including monitoring and debugging
23 Videoconferencing Service
To cope with the infrastructure expansion and refurbishment a proper professional service has been
set up where only random initiatives where in place before After setting up a coordinated team of
experts hosted at CERN IT-UDS-AVC several initiatives have been planned to support manage and
maintain the new infrastructure being rebuilt
Some of the initiatives implied to put in place a model where central frameworks were setup to allow
the remote management operation and maintenance of the main potential ldquopoints of failurerdquo of the
whole infrastructure (video codecs PCs and projectors) by setting up alarms via mail and sms in case
of system malfunction centrally scheduled software updates both for PCs and video codecs gathering
statistics of usage etc In short the objective is to have a standard infrastructure mostly automated
and at the same time centrally controlled The real activity of the service is somehow impressive
average of 1000 remote collaborative sessions per month that have a CERN venue as a central point
more than 10000 users distributed in more than 160 institutes over 37 countries The number of
sessions and users involved is expected to grow at least by a factor of 2 with the LHC startup
Figure 2 TMS (Tandberg Management Suite) for remote management of the VC infrastructure
With the new tools and developments in place it was possible to completely review the support
model giving emphasis to remote support This step was very important since it allowed reducing
dramatically the times required for user support including time to understand the problem and propose
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
3
a successful fix On the contrary to what happens in other IT services the collaborative activity is a
completely real time so delays in problem solving or troubleshooting at the user or system level are
simply not an option To achieve this a VCROC (Videoconferencing Remote Operations Centre) has
been setup The VCROC consists of a set of 4 PCs with 4 displays and a videoconferencing unit
Through the VCROC operators can have a constant snapshot of the service activity proactively
intervene in case of a problem detected or interact with users for troubleshooting assistance etc
In terms of videoconferencing infrastructure some progress has also been achieved A new
MCU[14] (Multipoint Control Unit) service will be put in place during the summer of 2009 to be part
of the catalogue of services offered to the LHC A gateway is already hosted to allow users to use any
Telephone Conference system from the same H323 terminal avoiding setup and equipment
duplication
The service activity is not limited to the day-to-day operation of the LHC collaborative activity but
also to provide support consultancy and expertise for major events and outreach activities The service
members have been actively involved and sometimes leading the setup of the big events for the LHC
start-up namely the LHC Beam Day [22] and the LHC Grid Fest [21] Moreover the Team is
providing expertise to all the Experimentsrsquo special projects in the Collaborative Tools domain such as
the CMS Centres Worldwide project [5]
Figure 3 CMS centre at CERN (Meyrin)
24 Technology Research amp Indico Integration
In parallel with all the activities described above several initiatives took place to analyze the market
trends technologies vendors applications and related services in the Unified Communications and
rich media conferencing and collaborative fields In short the idea is to be in close contact with the
initiatives in the commercial world and directions taken By tightening partnerships with commercial
vendors some results have been already achieved general guidelines for service and setup
specifications high quality endpoint tests and pilots such as Telepresence[23] and new scalable codec
implementations for Desktops (such as H264-SVC)[24]
This ongoing assessment has also produced another immediate conclusion large dispersed
communities such as the LHC will probably not converge to one single collaborative tool as the
multiplicity of use cases scenarios bandwidths available endpoint setups etc will make this task
very difficult if not impossible From the end user point of view this finding implies that any Unified
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
4
Communication scenario is provided with an additional degree of customization where all the
underlying collaborative technologies and the associated resources can be operated managed and used
in a transparent way For the LHC the customization layer has been early identified that should be
provided by Indico Management system [18]
The Integrated Digital Conference (Indico) software is a web‐based multi‐platform conference
lifecycle management system and agenda It has also become the long term archiving tool for
documents and metadata related to all kinds of events that take place at CERN and LHC at large The
software is used in production at CERN (hosting gt65000 events and around 10000 visitors per day)
and in more than 50 institutes worldwide Due to this high interest the expectations on the tool are
high being permanently under heavy development providing grounds for the establishment of many
challenging RampD projects
Figure 4 New Indico interface to be in production during 2009
Concerning collaborative tools integration the first prototype has been developed and will be put in
production during the summer of 2009 The future versions of Indico will allow the user to book and
start collaborative resources such as EVO[13] or an MCU and start the remote session by pushing a
software button at the time of the meeting
Figure 5 Collaborative Tools integration in Indico
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
5
The next step will be to add the necessary intelligence to Indico (using remote agents) allowing the
automatic management of the remote session (automatic start if the user wishes)
3 New Challenges
31 Standard Collaborative Environment
The communication challenges of the LHC are considered critical for the success of the collaboration
and the efforts to address them didnrsquot come from nothing As mentioned above several important
initiatives have been taken to survey the collaborations in order to help clarifying the requirements
(both technical and financial) to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and to
research the latest developments offered by the scientific and commercial sectors in terms of
applications technologies and services Different collaboration surveys made inside the LHC
community have included extensive studies early in 2003 and 2004 Recently these studies have been
followed up by a general LHC-wide survey [8] performed by CERN IT on behalf of the Experiments
In an effort to consolidate information and to assess the complete requirements of the LHC
for collaborative tools the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) Project launched an RTAG (Requirements
and Technical Assessment Group) in 2004 The grouprsquos findings and recommendations were
presented in a final report [3] endorsed by the LHC experiments This report has been summarized
and presented at numerous international conferences including CHEP 2006 in Mumbai India [9]
Recently in order to follow-up the work already done by RTAG 12 and other previous boards and to
clarify and standardize the Collaborative Environment for the LHC the LCEB[15] (LHC
Collaborative Environments Board) has been created with extended representation from a variety of
other physics Labs to include videoconferencing expertise and representation of the remote users
LCEB is replacing RCTF and given the additional charge of following up the surveys and assessments
in order to draft a standard collaborative environment solution both in technical and financial terms
supported by all parties involved The problem under discussion is clear in exchange of funding the
Experiments would like an integrated collaborative environment for the LHC to be established and
handled through CERN IT with some degree of control over the service development priorities in
order to assure that the LHC issues receive the necessary support In addition provided that the
funding comes from the Experiments the sharing of costs should reflect its measured usage
32 Assessing the LHC Needs
The first task of LCEB is to gather and agree on a set of requirements These requirements are
intended to drive the assessment CERN IT is carrying out in order to compare the current tools in use
at the LHC collaborations with other systems on the market and come up with a standardized offer
which will be well suited for all the users and funded transparently by the LHC community It is well
understood that any change in the current collaborative environment will have to be the result of a
careful maturation process and wont be done over night The next steps of the process will be a test
phase (limited to the systems that fulfil the agreed requirements) and finalized by issuing a
recommendation
4 Summary
Important progress has been made over the past two years in the design planning development and
deployment of collaborative tools supporting the LHC The current state of the infrastructure is not
comparable to what existed only a few years ago at CERN The general feedback about this progress
from the Experiments is very positive The major recommendations of the RTAG 12 on Collaborative
Tools have either been addressed or currently being followed up a professional service has been set
up to handle requests and to intervene quickly for problem resolution the set of the most common
meeting venues at CERN are equipped professionally for audio and videoconference with some
additional to come in 2009 More generally the majority of meetings held by the Experiments are
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
6
broadcast[20] or recorded in one form or another allowing participation by all members of the
collaborations including important presentations seminars and tutorials an integrated environment is
being designed and put in place in the form of a common customized interface that will support all the
collaborative tool services and activities under its umbrella most importantly the central coordination
of CERN IT is providing project management and accountability critically important to define a path
for the Experiments for technical specifications and viable financial agreements for the services
required
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the CERN IT Department and the Experiment
Resource Coordinators and Representatives for supporting all the work done in the field of
Collaborative Tools for the LHC In addition the author would like to thank the IT-UDS Group
Leader and IT-UDS-AVC Section Leader for all the support and guidance Finally a special thanks to
Knut Bjorkli and David Martin Clavo for the huge amount of work done
References
[1] RCTF Remote Collaboration Task Force was a body chaired by CERN-IT UDS with
representation from that group and the LHC collaborationsin charge of the development and
installation of collaborative tools at CERN in support of the experiments
[2] Collaborative Tools and the LHC An Update S Goldfarb Proceedings of the International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of
Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082002
[3] Report of the LHC Computing Grid Project RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools S Goldfarb et
al CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-07 (2005)
[4] Virtual Room Videoconferencing System Developed by the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) Replaced by EVO in 2008
[5] CMS Centres Worldwide a New Collaborative Infrastructure L Taylor Oral Presentation
Collaborative Tools Session CHEP 2009
[6] Opportunities for Use and Development of Collaborative Tools in ATLAS S Goldfarb et
al ATL-GEN-2003-002 (2003)
[7] VRVS User Community Survey Results March 2004
[8] CERN Remote Collaborative Tools Survey October 2008
[9] LCG RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools for the LHC S Goldfarb Proceedings to International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Mumbai 2006 McMillian
India Ltd Vol I421-425 (2006)
[10] Shaping Collaboration 2006 a joint workshop held Dec 11-13 2006 with participation by the
Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments and LHC Users
[11] Shaping Collaboration 2006 Action Items for the LHC S Goldfarb J Herr HA Neal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear
Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082003
[12] CERN Videoconference Rooms web site of Audiovisual and Collaborative Services
[13] EVO Enabling Virtual Organizations is video conferencing system designed for HEP
capable of connecting a variety of clients including H323 It succeeds VRVS
[14] CERN MCU is an MCU-based H323 video conferencing system supported by CERN IT to be
put in production during the summer of 2009
[15] LCEB LHC Collaborative Environments Board is a body chaired by CERNIT UDS and
containing representation from that group the LHC experiments other physics laboratories
and expertise in video conferencing
[16] Succesful Video Communication CISCO White Paper Jan 2009
[17] H323 and SIP are the industry standard protocols for video and audio conferencing
[18] Indico is an Event Management System used to manage meetings and conferences (such as
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
7
CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
8
Virtuality and Efficiency - Overcoming Past Antinomy in the
Remote Collaboration Experience
Joao Fernandes1 Knut Bjorkli David Martin Clavo Thomas Baron
CERN IT-UDS-AVC 1211 Geneva 23 Switzerland
E-mail JoaoFernandescernch
Abstract Several recent initiatives have been put in place by the CERN IT Department to
improve the user experience in remote dispersed meetings and remote collaboration at large in
the LHC communities worldwide We will present an analysis of the factors which were
historically limiting the efficiency of remote dispersed meetings and describe the consequent
actions which were undertaken at CERN to overcome these limitations After giving a status
update of the different equipment available at CERN to enable the virtual sessions and the
various collaborative tools which are currently proposed to users we will focus on the
evolution of this market how can the new technological trends (among others HD
videoconferencing Telepresence Unified Communications etc) impact positively the user
experience and how to attain the best usage of them Finally by projecting ourselves in the
future we will give some hints as to how to answer the difficult question of selecting the next
generation of collaborative tools which set of tools among the various offers (systems like
Vidyo H264 SVC next generation EVO Groupware offers standard H323 systems etc) is
best suited for our environment and how to unify this set for the common user This will finally
allow us to definitively overcome the past antinomy between virtuality and efficiency
1 Introduction
In 2007 the RCTF board (Remote Collaboration Task Force) was formed in response to
recommendations of the LCG RTAG 12 Final Report [3] The RTAG 12 has recommended several
actions considered critical for the future of the collaborative tools in the LHC Perhaps the most
important one was to centralize the coordination of the remote collaborative activities under CERN IT
with oversight from the LHC experiments Since then RCTF has overseen the progress at CERN
effectively implementing most of the key recommendations This has included the signing of service-
level agreements by ATLAS and CMS and specifying the installation and support of conference
facilities at CERN Much of the deployment and installation work is now complete the attention is
shifting toward other challenges including service and infrastructure consolidation and central
application support by CERNIT The author will summarize a few of the successful implementations
of the new policy and developments before pointing out the new challenges and directions to focus in
the near future
2 Progress Achieved amp Current Status
21 Organization
1 To whom any correspondence should be addressed
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
ccopy 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd 1
The most important outcome of the initiatives described above was the creation of an organizational
body at CERN responsible for the design planning development and maintenance of collaborative
tool facilities and services for the LHC CERN IT-UDS-AVC was identified as this body with
oversight from the collaborations provided via the RCTF With this scheme in place significant
progress was made on several fronts This has included videoconferencing facilities Web casting and
Web Lecturing systems integrated environments and web-based authentication and authorization
representing progress basically on every major recommendation of the RTAG 12 final document This
effort is seen as an excellent example of strong coordination and cooperation between CERN IT and
the Experiments The facilities were installed following a specification that was taking into
consideration such key factors as the lighting and sound characteristics of the rooms common use
cases documentation central management support and maintenance capabilities in order to achieve a
specified standard to be replicated site wide
22 Videoconferencing Facilities
The video conferencing hardware agreements between CERN IT and the Experiments required some
time and effort by all parties involved However as soon as the agreements have been reached the
way for serious progress was opened In 2008 only 21 new meeting rooms and auditoria commonly
used by the LHC Experiments were equipped for high-quality audio and video conferencing for a total
of 35 standard videoconferencing rooms on site Agreements have been reached not only with the two
biggest Experiments (ATLAS and CMS) but also with the majority of CERN Departments (AB AT
DSU Directorate IT etc) which allowed to fully standardize the whole infrastructure A complete list
of facilities (constantly updated) their equipment and status is available via the CERN IT-UDS-AVC
web pages [12]
The installed endpoints take advantage of the latest videoconferencing technology on the market
supporting H323 and SIP protocols all of them supporting phone and video connections High-
Definition flat screens are employed for the videoconferencing endpoints with projectors displaying
the presentation material in a large format for local andor remote viewing Audio is transmitted via
microphones using high quality echo suppression systems (built-in the codecs) for best audio quality
Figure 1 Standard videoconferencing room at Point 1 (ATLAS)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
2
A significant number of tests were performed under a variety of conditions to assure best-quality
audio for both audio only and videoconference sessions User input was obtained and evaluated The
development team put a serious effort on monitoring and reviewing data from meetings held in pilot
rooms before designing the final standard configuration to be employed and replicated All facilities
are documented with user guides available on the Web and printed in the rooms
Tutorials are available online and on-site training is provided by direct requests or through the
official CERN Training Catalogue [25] Although several meeting conveners are running many
meetings in an autonomous way any user are welcome to request assistance and training for meetings
including monitoring and debugging
23 Videoconferencing Service
To cope with the infrastructure expansion and refurbishment a proper professional service has been
set up where only random initiatives where in place before After setting up a coordinated team of
experts hosted at CERN IT-UDS-AVC several initiatives have been planned to support manage and
maintain the new infrastructure being rebuilt
Some of the initiatives implied to put in place a model where central frameworks were setup to allow
the remote management operation and maintenance of the main potential ldquopoints of failurerdquo of the
whole infrastructure (video codecs PCs and projectors) by setting up alarms via mail and sms in case
of system malfunction centrally scheduled software updates both for PCs and video codecs gathering
statistics of usage etc In short the objective is to have a standard infrastructure mostly automated
and at the same time centrally controlled The real activity of the service is somehow impressive
average of 1000 remote collaborative sessions per month that have a CERN venue as a central point
more than 10000 users distributed in more than 160 institutes over 37 countries The number of
sessions and users involved is expected to grow at least by a factor of 2 with the LHC startup
Figure 2 TMS (Tandberg Management Suite) for remote management of the VC infrastructure
With the new tools and developments in place it was possible to completely review the support
model giving emphasis to remote support This step was very important since it allowed reducing
dramatically the times required for user support including time to understand the problem and propose
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
3
a successful fix On the contrary to what happens in other IT services the collaborative activity is a
completely real time so delays in problem solving or troubleshooting at the user or system level are
simply not an option To achieve this a VCROC (Videoconferencing Remote Operations Centre) has
been setup The VCROC consists of a set of 4 PCs with 4 displays and a videoconferencing unit
Through the VCROC operators can have a constant snapshot of the service activity proactively
intervene in case of a problem detected or interact with users for troubleshooting assistance etc
In terms of videoconferencing infrastructure some progress has also been achieved A new
MCU[14] (Multipoint Control Unit) service will be put in place during the summer of 2009 to be part
of the catalogue of services offered to the LHC A gateway is already hosted to allow users to use any
Telephone Conference system from the same H323 terminal avoiding setup and equipment
duplication
The service activity is not limited to the day-to-day operation of the LHC collaborative activity but
also to provide support consultancy and expertise for major events and outreach activities The service
members have been actively involved and sometimes leading the setup of the big events for the LHC
start-up namely the LHC Beam Day [22] and the LHC Grid Fest [21] Moreover the Team is
providing expertise to all the Experimentsrsquo special projects in the Collaborative Tools domain such as
the CMS Centres Worldwide project [5]
Figure 3 CMS centre at CERN (Meyrin)
24 Technology Research amp Indico Integration
In parallel with all the activities described above several initiatives took place to analyze the market
trends technologies vendors applications and related services in the Unified Communications and
rich media conferencing and collaborative fields In short the idea is to be in close contact with the
initiatives in the commercial world and directions taken By tightening partnerships with commercial
vendors some results have been already achieved general guidelines for service and setup
specifications high quality endpoint tests and pilots such as Telepresence[23] and new scalable codec
implementations for Desktops (such as H264-SVC)[24]
This ongoing assessment has also produced another immediate conclusion large dispersed
communities such as the LHC will probably not converge to one single collaborative tool as the
multiplicity of use cases scenarios bandwidths available endpoint setups etc will make this task
very difficult if not impossible From the end user point of view this finding implies that any Unified
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
4
Communication scenario is provided with an additional degree of customization where all the
underlying collaborative technologies and the associated resources can be operated managed and used
in a transparent way For the LHC the customization layer has been early identified that should be
provided by Indico Management system [18]
The Integrated Digital Conference (Indico) software is a web‐based multi‐platform conference
lifecycle management system and agenda It has also become the long term archiving tool for
documents and metadata related to all kinds of events that take place at CERN and LHC at large The
software is used in production at CERN (hosting gt65000 events and around 10000 visitors per day)
and in more than 50 institutes worldwide Due to this high interest the expectations on the tool are
high being permanently under heavy development providing grounds for the establishment of many
challenging RampD projects
Figure 4 New Indico interface to be in production during 2009
Concerning collaborative tools integration the first prototype has been developed and will be put in
production during the summer of 2009 The future versions of Indico will allow the user to book and
start collaborative resources such as EVO[13] or an MCU and start the remote session by pushing a
software button at the time of the meeting
Figure 5 Collaborative Tools integration in Indico
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
5
The next step will be to add the necessary intelligence to Indico (using remote agents) allowing the
automatic management of the remote session (automatic start if the user wishes)
3 New Challenges
31 Standard Collaborative Environment
The communication challenges of the LHC are considered critical for the success of the collaboration
and the efforts to address them didnrsquot come from nothing As mentioned above several important
initiatives have been taken to survey the collaborations in order to help clarifying the requirements
(both technical and financial) to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and to
research the latest developments offered by the scientific and commercial sectors in terms of
applications technologies and services Different collaboration surveys made inside the LHC
community have included extensive studies early in 2003 and 2004 Recently these studies have been
followed up by a general LHC-wide survey [8] performed by CERN IT on behalf of the Experiments
In an effort to consolidate information and to assess the complete requirements of the LHC
for collaborative tools the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) Project launched an RTAG (Requirements
and Technical Assessment Group) in 2004 The grouprsquos findings and recommendations were
presented in a final report [3] endorsed by the LHC experiments This report has been summarized
and presented at numerous international conferences including CHEP 2006 in Mumbai India [9]
Recently in order to follow-up the work already done by RTAG 12 and other previous boards and to
clarify and standardize the Collaborative Environment for the LHC the LCEB[15] (LHC
Collaborative Environments Board) has been created with extended representation from a variety of
other physics Labs to include videoconferencing expertise and representation of the remote users
LCEB is replacing RCTF and given the additional charge of following up the surveys and assessments
in order to draft a standard collaborative environment solution both in technical and financial terms
supported by all parties involved The problem under discussion is clear in exchange of funding the
Experiments would like an integrated collaborative environment for the LHC to be established and
handled through CERN IT with some degree of control over the service development priorities in
order to assure that the LHC issues receive the necessary support In addition provided that the
funding comes from the Experiments the sharing of costs should reflect its measured usage
32 Assessing the LHC Needs
The first task of LCEB is to gather and agree on a set of requirements These requirements are
intended to drive the assessment CERN IT is carrying out in order to compare the current tools in use
at the LHC collaborations with other systems on the market and come up with a standardized offer
which will be well suited for all the users and funded transparently by the LHC community It is well
understood that any change in the current collaborative environment will have to be the result of a
careful maturation process and wont be done over night The next steps of the process will be a test
phase (limited to the systems that fulfil the agreed requirements) and finalized by issuing a
recommendation
4 Summary
Important progress has been made over the past two years in the design planning development and
deployment of collaborative tools supporting the LHC The current state of the infrastructure is not
comparable to what existed only a few years ago at CERN The general feedback about this progress
from the Experiments is very positive The major recommendations of the RTAG 12 on Collaborative
Tools have either been addressed or currently being followed up a professional service has been set
up to handle requests and to intervene quickly for problem resolution the set of the most common
meeting venues at CERN are equipped professionally for audio and videoconference with some
additional to come in 2009 More generally the majority of meetings held by the Experiments are
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
6
broadcast[20] or recorded in one form or another allowing participation by all members of the
collaborations including important presentations seminars and tutorials an integrated environment is
being designed and put in place in the form of a common customized interface that will support all the
collaborative tool services and activities under its umbrella most importantly the central coordination
of CERN IT is providing project management and accountability critically important to define a path
for the Experiments for technical specifications and viable financial agreements for the services
required
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the CERN IT Department and the Experiment
Resource Coordinators and Representatives for supporting all the work done in the field of
Collaborative Tools for the LHC In addition the author would like to thank the IT-UDS Group
Leader and IT-UDS-AVC Section Leader for all the support and guidance Finally a special thanks to
Knut Bjorkli and David Martin Clavo for the huge amount of work done
References
[1] RCTF Remote Collaboration Task Force was a body chaired by CERN-IT UDS with
representation from that group and the LHC collaborationsin charge of the development and
installation of collaborative tools at CERN in support of the experiments
[2] Collaborative Tools and the LHC An Update S Goldfarb Proceedings of the International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of
Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082002
[3] Report of the LHC Computing Grid Project RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools S Goldfarb et
al CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-07 (2005)
[4] Virtual Room Videoconferencing System Developed by the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) Replaced by EVO in 2008
[5] CMS Centres Worldwide a New Collaborative Infrastructure L Taylor Oral Presentation
Collaborative Tools Session CHEP 2009
[6] Opportunities for Use and Development of Collaborative Tools in ATLAS S Goldfarb et
al ATL-GEN-2003-002 (2003)
[7] VRVS User Community Survey Results March 2004
[8] CERN Remote Collaborative Tools Survey October 2008
[9] LCG RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools for the LHC S Goldfarb Proceedings to International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Mumbai 2006 McMillian
India Ltd Vol I421-425 (2006)
[10] Shaping Collaboration 2006 a joint workshop held Dec 11-13 2006 with participation by the
Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments and LHC Users
[11] Shaping Collaboration 2006 Action Items for the LHC S Goldfarb J Herr HA Neal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear
Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082003
[12] CERN Videoconference Rooms web site of Audiovisual and Collaborative Services
[13] EVO Enabling Virtual Organizations is video conferencing system designed for HEP
capable of connecting a variety of clients including H323 It succeeds VRVS
[14] CERN MCU is an MCU-based H323 video conferencing system supported by CERN IT to be
put in production during the summer of 2009
[15] LCEB LHC Collaborative Environments Board is a body chaired by CERNIT UDS and
containing representation from that group the LHC experiments other physics laboratories
and expertise in video conferencing
[16] Succesful Video Communication CISCO White Paper Jan 2009
[17] H323 and SIP are the industry standard protocols for video and audio conferencing
[18] Indico is an Event Management System used to manage meetings and conferences (such as
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
7
CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
8
The most important outcome of the initiatives described above was the creation of an organizational
body at CERN responsible for the design planning development and maintenance of collaborative
tool facilities and services for the LHC CERN IT-UDS-AVC was identified as this body with
oversight from the collaborations provided via the RCTF With this scheme in place significant
progress was made on several fronts This has included videoconferencing facilities Web casting and
Web Lecturing systems integrated environments and web-based authentication and authorization
representing progress basically on every major recommendation of the RTAG 12 final document This
effort is seen as an excellent example of strong coordination and cooperation between CERN IT and
the Experiments The facilities were installed following a specification that was taking into
consideration such key factors as the lighting and sound characteristics of the rooms common use
cases documentation central management support and maintenance capabilities in order to achieve a
specified standard to be replicated site wide
22 Videoconferencing Facilities
The video conferencing hardware agreements between CERN IT and the Experiments required some
time and effort by all parties involved However as soon as the agreements have been reached the
way for serious progress was opened In 2008 only 21 new meeting rooms and auditoria commonly
used by the LHC Experiments were equipped for high-quality audio and video conferencing for a total
of 35 standard videoconferencing rooms on site Agreements have been reached not only with the two
biggest Experiments (ATLAS and CMS) but also with the majority of CERN Departments (AB AT
DSU Directorate IT etc) which allowed to fully standardize the whole infrastructure A complete list
of facilities (constantly updated) their equipment and status is available via the CERN IT-UDS-AVC
web pages [12]
The installed endpoints take advantage of the latest videoconferencing technology on the market
supporting H323 and SIP protocols all of them supporting phone and video connections High-
Definition flat screens are employed for the videoconferencing endpoints with projectors displaying
the presentation material in a large format for local andor remote viewing Audio is transmitted via
microphones using high quality echo suppression systems (built-in the codecs) for best audio quality
Figure 1 Standard videoconferencing room at Point 1 (ATLAS)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
2
A significant number of tests were performed under a variety of conditions to assure best-quality
audio for both audio only and videoconference sessions User input was obtained and evaluated The
development team put a serious effort on monitoring and reviewing data from meetings held in pilot
rooms before designing the final standard configuration to be employed and replicated All facilities
are documented with user guides available on the Web and printed in the rooms
Tutorials are available online and on-site training is provided by direct requests or through the
official CERN Training Catalogue [25] Although several meeting conveners are running many
meetings in an autonomous way any user are welcome to request assistance and training for meetings
including monitoring and debugging
23 Videoconferencing Service
To cope with the infrastructure expansion and refurbishment a proper professional service has been
set up where only random initiatives where in place before After setting up a coordinated team of
experts hosted at CERN IT-UDS-AVC several initiatives have been planned to support manage and
maintain the new infrastructure being rebuilt
Some of the initiatives implied to put in place a model where central frameworks were setup to allow
the remote management operation and maintenance of the main potential ldquopoints of failurerdquo of the
whole infrastructure (video codecs PCs and projectors) by setting up alarms via mail and sms in case
of system malfunction centrally scheduled software updates both for PCs and video codecs gathering
statistics of usage etc In short the objective is to have a standard infrastructure mostly automated
and at the same time centrally controlled The real activity of the service is somehow impressive
average of 1000 remote collaborative sessions per month that have a CERN venue as a central point
more than 10000 users distributed in more than 160 institutes over 37 countries The number of
sessions and users involved is expected to grow at least by a factor of 2 with the LHC startup
Figure 2 TMS (Tandberg Management Suite) for remote management of the VC infrastructure
With the new tools and developments in place it was possible to completely review the support
model giving emphasis to remote support This step was very important since it allowed reducing
dramatically the times required for user support including time to understand the problem and propose
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
3
a successful fix On the contrary to what happens in other IT services the collaborative activity is a
completely real time so delays in problem solving or troubleshooting at the user or system level are
simply not an option To achieve this a VCROC (Videoconferencing Remote Operations Centre) has
been setup The VCROC consists of a set of 4 PCs with 4 displays and a videoconferencing unit
Through the VCROC operators can have a constant snapshot of the service activity proactively
intervene in case of a problem detected or interact with users for troubleshooting assistance etc
In terms of videoconferencing infrastructure some progress has also been achieved A new
MCU[14] (Multipoint Control Unit) service will be put in place during the summer of 2009 to be part
of the catalogue of services offered to the LHC A gateway is already hosted to allow users to use any
Telephone Conference system from the same H323 terminal avoiding setup and equipment
duplication
The service activity is not limited to the day-to-day operation of the LHC collaborative activity but
also to provide support consultancy and expertise for major events and outreach activities The service
members have been actively involved and sometimes leading the setup of the big events for the LHC
start-up namely the LHC Beam Day [22] and the LHC Grid Fest [21] Moreover the Team is
providing expertise to all the Experimentsrsquo special projects in the Collaborative Tools domain such as
the CMS Centres Worldwide project [5]
Figure 3 CMS centre at CERN (Meyrin)
24 Technology Research amp Indico Integration
In parallel with all the activities described above several initiatives took place to analyze the market
trends technologies vendors applications and related services in the Unified Communications and
rich media conferencing and collaborative fields In short the idea is to be in close contact with the
initiatives in the commercial world and directions taken By tightening partnerships with commercial
vendors some results have been already achieved general guidelines for service and setup
specifications high quality endpoint tests and pilots such as Telepresence[23] and new scalable codec
implementations for Desktops (such as H264-SVC)[24]
This ongoing assessment has also produced another immediate conclusion large dispersed
communities such as the LHC will probably not converge to one single collaborative tool as the
multiplicity of use cases scenarios bandwidths available endpoint setups etc will make this task
very difficult if not impossible From the end user point of view this finding implies that any Unified
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
4
Communication scenario is provided with an additional degree of customization where all the
underlying collaborative technologies and the associated resources can be operated managed and used
in a transparent way For the LHC the customization layer has been early identified that should be
provided by Indico Management system [18]
The Integrated Digital Conference (Indico) software is a web‐based multi‐platform conference
lifecycle management system and agenda It has also become the long term archiving tool for
documents and metadata related to all kinds of events that take place at CERN and LHC at large The
software is used in production at CERN (hosting gt65000 events and around 10000 visitors per day)
and in more than 50 institutes worldwide Due to this high interest the expectations on the tool are
high being permanently under heavy development providing grounds for the establishment of many
challenging RampD projects
Figure 4 New Indico interface to be in production during 2009
Concerning collaborative tools integration the first prototype has been developed and will be put in
production during the summer of 2009 The future versions of Indico will allow the user to book and
start collaborative resources such as EVO[13] or an MCU and start the remote session by pushing a
software button at the time of the meeting
Figure 5 Collaborative Tools integration in Indico
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
5
The next step will be to add the necessary intelligence to Indico (using remote agents) allowing the
automatic management of the remote session (automatic start if the user wishes)
3 New Challenges
31 Standard Collaborative Environment
The communication challenges of the LHC are considered critical for the success of the collaboration
and the efforts to address them didnrsquot come from nothing As mentioned above several important
initiatives have been taken to survey the collaborations in order to help clarifying the requirements
(both technical and financial) to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and to
research the latest developments offered by the scientific and commercial sectors in terms of
applications technologies and services Different collaboration surveys made inside the LHC
community have included extensive studies early in 2003 and 2004 Recently these studies have been
followed up by a general LHC-wide survey [8] performed by CERN IT on behalf of the Experiments
In an effort to consolidate information and to assess the complete requirements of the LHC
for collaborative tools the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) Project launched an RTAG (Requirements
and Technical Assessment Group) in 2004 The grouprsquos findings and recommendations were
presented in a final report [3] endorsed by the LHC experiments This report has been summarized
and presented at numerous international conferences including CHEP 2006 in Mumbai India [9]
Recently in order to follow-up the work already done by RTAG 12 and other previous boards and to
clarify and standardize the Collaborative Environment for the LHC the LCEB[15] (LHC
Collaborative Environments Board) has been created with extended representation from a variety of
other physics Labs to include videoconferencing expertise and representation of the remote users
LCEB is replacing RCTF and given the additional charge of following up the surveys and assessments
in order to draft a standard collaborative environment solution both in technical and financial terms
supported by all parties involved The problem under discussion is clear in exchange of funding the
Experiments would like an integrated collaborative environment for the LHC to be established and
handled through CERN IT with some degree of control over the service development priorities in
order to assure that the LHC issues receive the necessary support In addition provided that the
funding comes from the Experiments the sharing of costs should reflect its measured usage
32 Assessing the LHC Needs
The first task of LCEB is to gather and agree on a set of requirements These requirements are
intended to drive the assessment CERN IT is carrying out in order to compare the current tools in use
at the LHC collaborations with other systems on the market and come up with a standardized offer
which will be well suited for all the users and funded transparently by the LHC community It is well
understood that any change in the current collaborative environment will have to be the result of a
careful maturation process and wont be done over night The next steps of the process will be a test
phase (limited to the systems that fulfil the agreed requirements) and finalized by issuing a
recommendation
4 Summary
Important progress has been made over the past two years in the design planning development and
deployment of collaborative tools supporting the LHC The current state of the infrastructure is not
comparable to what existed only a few years ago at CERN The general feedback about this progress
from the Experiments is very positive The major recommendations of the RTAG 12 on Collaborative
Tools have either been addressed or currently being followed up a professional service has been set
up to handle requests and to intervene quickly for problem resolution the set of the most common
meeting venues at CERN are equipped professionally for audio and videoconference with some
additional to come in 2009 More generally the majority of meetings held by the Experiments are
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
6
broadcast[20] or recorded in one form or another allowing participation by all members of the
collaborations including important presentations seminars and tutorials an integrated environment is
being designed and put in place in the form of a common customized interface that will support all the
collaborative tool services and activities under its umbrella most importantly the central coordination
of CERN IT is providing project management and accountability critically important to define a path
for the Experiments for technical specifications and viable financial agreements for the services
required
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the CERN IT Department and the Experiment
Resource Coordinators and Representatives for supporting all the work done in the field of
Collaborative Tools for the LHC In addition the author would like to thank the IT-UDS Group
Leader and IT-UDS-AVC Section Leader for all the support and guidance Finally a special thanks to
Knut Bjorkli and David Martin Clavo for the huge amount of work done
References
[1] RCTF Remote Collaboration Task Force was a body chaired by CERN-IT UDS with
representation from that group and the LHC collaborationsin charge of the development and
installation of collaborative tools at CERN in support of the experiments
[2] Collaborative Tools and the LHC An Update S Goldfarb Proceedings of the International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of
Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082002
[3] Report of the LHC Computing Grid Project RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools S Goldfarb et
al CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-07 (2005)
[4] Virtual Room Videoconferencing System Developed by the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) Replaced by EVO in 2008
[5] CMS Centres Worldwide a New Collaborative Infrastructure L Taylor Oral Presentation
Collaborative Tools Session CHEP 2009
[6] Opportunities for Use and Development of Collaborative Tools in ATLAS S Goldfarb et
al ATL-GEN-2003-002 (2003)
[7] VRVS User Community Survey Results March 2004
[8] CERN Remote Collaborative Tools Survey October 2008
[9] LCG RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools for the LHC S Goldfarb Proceedings to International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Mumbai 2006 McMillian
India Ltd Vol I421-425 (2006)
[10] Shaping Collaboration 2006 a joint workshop held Dec 11-13 2006 with participation by the
Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments and LHC Users
[11] Shaping Collaboration 2006 Action Items for the LHC S Goldfarb J Herr HA Neal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear
Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082003
[12] CERN Videoconference Rooms web site of Audiovisual and Collaborative Services
[13] EVO Enabling Virtual Organizations is video conferencing system designed for HEP
capable of connecting a variety of clients including H323 It succeeds VRVS
[14] CERN MCU is an MCU-based H323 video conferencing system supported by CERN IT to be
put in production during the summer of 2009
[15] LCEB LHC Collaborative Environments Board is a body chaired by CERNIT UDS and
containing representation from that group the LHC experiments other physics laboratories
and expertise in video conferencing
[16] Succesful Video Communication CISCO White Paper Jan 2009
[17] H323 and SIP are the industry standard protocols for video and audio conferencing
[18] Indico is an Event Management System used to manage meetings and conferences (such as
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
7
CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
8
A significant number of tests were performed under a variety of conditions to assure best-quality
audio for both audio only and videoconference sessions User input was obtained and evaluated The
development team put a serious effort on monitoring and reviewing data from meetings held in pilot
rooms before designing the final standard configuration to be employed and replicated All facilities
are documented with user guides available on the Web and printed in the rooms
Tutorials are available online and on-site training is provided by direct requests or through the
official CERN Training Catalogue [25] Although several meeting conveners are running many
meetings in an autonomous way any user are welcome to request assistance and training for meetings
including monitoring and debugging
23 Videoconferencing Service
To cope with the infrastructure expansion and refurbishment a proper professional service has been
set up where only random initiatives where in place before After setting up a coordinated team of
experts hosted at CERN IT-UDS-AVC several initiatives have been planned to support manage and
maintain the new infrastructure being rebuilt
Some of the initiatives implied to put in place a model where central frameworks were setup to allow
the remote management operation and maintenance of the main potential ldquopoints of failurerdquo of the
whole infrastructure (video codecs PCs and projectors) by setting up alarms via mail and sms in case
of system malfunction centrally scheduled software updates both for PCs and video codecs gathering
statistics of usage etc In short the objective is to have a standard infrastructure mostly automated
and at the same time centrally controlled The real activity of the service is somehow impressive
average of 1000 remote collaborative sessions per month that have a CERN venue as a central point
more than 10000 users distributed in more than 160 institutes over 37 countries The number of
sessions and users involved is expected to grow at least by a factor of 2 with the LHC startup
Figure 2 TMS (Tandberg Management Suite) for remote management of the VC infrastructure
With the new tools and developments in place it was possible to completely review the support
model giving emphasis to remote support This step was very important since it allowed reducing
dramatically the times required for user support including time to understand the problem and propose
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
3
a successful fix On the contrary to what happens in other IT services the collaborative activity is a
completely real time so delays in problem solving or troubleshooting at the user or system level are
simply not an option To achieve this a VCROC (Videoconferencing Remote Operations Centre) has
been setup The VCROC consists of a set of 4 PCs with 4 displays and a videoconferencing unit
Through the VCROC operators can have a constant snapshot of the service activity proactively
intervene in case of a problem detected or interact with users for troubleshooting assistance etc
In terms of videoconferencing infrastructure some progress has also been achieved A new
MCU[14] (Multipoint Control Unit) service will be put in place during the summer of 2009 to be part
of the catalogue of services offered to the LHC A gateway is already hosted to allow users to use any
Telephone Conference system from the same H323 terminal avoiding setup and equipment
duplication
The service activity is not limited to the day-to-day operation of the LHC collaborative activity but
also to provide support consultancy and expertise for major events and outreach activities The service
members have been actively involved and sometimes leading the setup of the big events for the LHC
start-up namely the LHC Beam Day [22] and the LHC Grid Fest [21] Moreover the Team is
providing expertise to all the Experimentsrsquo special projects in the Collaborative Tools domain such as
the CMS Centres Worldwide project [5]
Figure 3 CMS centre at CERN (Meyrin)
24 Technology Research amp Indico Integration
In parallel with all the activities described above several initiatives took place to analyze the market
trends technologies vendors applications and related services in the Unified Communications and
rich media conferencing and collaborative fields In short the idea is to be in close contact with the
initiatives in the commercial world and directions taken By tightening partnerships with commercial
vendors some results have been already achieved general guidelines for service and setup
specifications high quality endpoint tests and pilots such as Telepresence[23] and new scalable codec
implementations for Desktops (such as H264-SVC)[24]
This ongoing assessment has also produced another immediate conclusion large dispersed
communities such as the LHC will probably not converge to one single collaborative tool as the
multiplicity of use cases scenarios bandwidths available endpoint setups etc will make this task
very difficult if not impossible From the end user point of view this finding implies that any Unified
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
4
Communication scenario is provided with an additional degree of customization where all the
underlying collaborative technologies and the associated resources can be operated managed and used
in a transparent way For the LHC the customization layer has been early identified that should be
provided by Indico Management system [18]
The Integrated Digital Conference (Indico) software is a web‐based multi‐platform conference
lifecycle management system and agenda It has also become the long term archiving tool for
documents and metadata related to all kinds of events that take place at CERN and LHC at large The
software is used in production at CERN (hosting gt65000 events and around 10000 visitors per day)
and in more than 50 institutes worldwide Due to this high interest the expectations on the tool are
high being permanently under heavy development providing grounds for the establishment of many
challenging RampD projects
Figure 4 New Indico interface to be in production during 2009
Concerning collaborative tools integration the first prototype has been developed and will be put in
production during the summer of 2009 The future versions of Indico will allow the user to book and
start collaborative resources such as EVO[13] or an MCU and start the remote session by pushing a
software button at the time of the meeting
Figure 5 Collaborative Tools integration in Indico
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
5
The next step will be to add the necessary intelligence to Indico (using remote agents) allowing the
automatic management of the remote session (automatic start if the user wishes)
3 New Challenges
31 Standard Collaborative Environment
The communication challenges of the LHC are considered critical for the success of the collaboration
and the efforts to address them didnrsquot come from nothing As mentioned above several important
initiatives have been taken to survey the collaborations in order to help clarifying the requirements
(both technical and financial) to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and to
research the latest developments offered by the scientific and commercial sectors in terms of
applications technologies and services Different collaboration surveys made inside the LHC
community have included extensive studies early in 2003 and 2004 Recently these studies have been
followed up by a general LHC-wide survey [8] performed by CERN IT on behalf of the Experiments
In an effort to consolidate information and to assess the complete requirements of the LHC
for collaborative tools the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) Project launched an RTAG (Requirements
and Technical Assessment Group) in 2004 The grouprsquos findings and recommendations were
presented in a final report [3] endorsed by the LHC experiments This report has been summarized
and presented at numerous international conferences including CHEP 2006 in Mumbai India [9]
Recently in order to follow-up the work already done by RTAG 12 and other previous boards and to
clarify and standardize the Collaborative Environment for the LHC the LCEB[15] (LHC
Collaborative Environments Board) has been created with extended representation from a variety of
other physics Labs to include videoconferencing expertise and representation of the remote users
LCEB is replacing RCTF and given the additional charge of following up the surveys and assessments
in order to draft a standard collaborative environment solution both in technical and financial terms
supported by all parties involved The problem under discussion is clear in exchange of funding the
Experiments would like an integrated collaborative environment for the LHC to be established and
handled through CERN IT with some degree of control over the service development priorities in
order to assure that the LHC issues receive the necessary support In addition provided that the
funding comes from the Experiments the sharing of costs should reflect its measured usage
32 Assessing the LHC Needs
The first task of LCEB is to gather and agree on a set of requirements These requirements are
intended to drive the assessment CERN IT is carrying out in order to compare the current tools in use
at the LHC collaborations with other systems on the market and come up with a standardized offer
which will be well suited for all the users and funded transparently by the LHC community It is well
understood that any change in the current collaborative environment will have to be the result of a
careful maturation process and wont be done over night The next steps of the process will be a test
phase (limited to the systems that fulfil the agreed requirements) and finalized by issuing a
recommendation
4 Summary
Important progress has been made over the past two years in the design planning development and
deployment of collaborative tools supporting the LHC The current state of the infrastructure is not
comparable to what existed only a few years ago at CERN The general feedback about this progress
from the Experiments is very positive The major recommendations of the RTAG 12 on Collaborative
Tools have either been addressed or currently being followed up a professional service has been set
up to handle requests and to intervene quickly for problem resolution the set of the most common
meeting venues at CERN are equipped professionally for audio and videoconference with some
additional to come in 2009 More generally the majority of meetings held by the Experiments are
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
6
broadcast[20] or recorded in one form or another allowing participation by all members of the
collaborations including important presentations seminars and tutorials an integrated environment is
being designed and put in place in the form of a common customized interface that will support all the
collaborative tool services and activities under its umbrella most importantly the central coordination
of CERN IT is providing project management and accountability critically important to define a path
for the Experiments for technical specifications and viable financial agreements for the services
required
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the CERN IT Department and the Experiment
Resource Coordinators and Representatives for supporting all the work done in the field of
Collaborative Tools for the LHC In addition the author would like to thank the IT-UDS Group
Leader and IT-UDS-AVC Section Leader for all the support and guidance Finally a special thanks to
Knut Bjorkli and David Martin Clavo for the huge amount of work done
References
[1] RCTF Remote Collaboration Task Force was a body chaired by CERN-IT UDS with
representation from that group and the LHC collaborationsin charge of the development and
installation of collaborative tools at CERN in support of the experiments
[2] Collaborative Tools and the LHC An Update S Goldfarb Proceedings of the International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of
Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082002
[3] Report of the LHC Computing Grid Project RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools S Goldfarb et
al CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-07 (2005)
[4] Virtual Room Videoconferencing System Developed by the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) Replaced by EVO in 2008
[5] CMS Centres Worldwide a New Collaborative Infrastructure L Taylor Oral Presentation
Collaborative Tools Session CHEP 2009
[6] Opportunities for Use and Development of Collaborative Tools in ATLAS S Goldfarb et
al ATL-GEN-2003-002 (2003)
[7] VRVS User Community Survey Results March 2004
[8] CERN Remote Collaborative Tools Survey October 2008
[9] LCG RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools for the LHC S Goldfarb Proceedings to International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Mumbai 2006 McMillian
India Ltd Vol I421-425 (2006)
[10] Shaping Collaboration 2006 a joint workshop held Dec 11-13 2006 with participation by the
Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments and LHC Users
[11] Shaping Collaboration 2006 Action Items for the LHC S Goldfarb J Herr HA Neal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear
Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082003
[12] CERN Videoconference Rooms web site of Audiovisual and Collaborative Services
[13] EVO Enabling Virtual Organizations is video conferencing system designed for HEP
capable of connecting a variety of clients including H323 It succeeds VRVS
[14] CERN MCU is an MCU-based H323 video conferencing system supported by CERN IT to be
put in production during the summer of 2009
[15] LCEB LHC Collaborative Environments Board is a body chaired by CERNIT UDS and
containing representation from that group the LHC experiments other physics laboratories
and expertise in video conferencing
[16] Succesful Video Communication CISCO White Paper Jan 2009
[17] H323 and SIP are the industry standard protocols for video and audio conferencing
[18] Indico is an Event Management System used to manage meetings and conferences (such as
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
7
CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
8
a successful fix On the contrary to what happens in other IT services the collaborative activity is a
completely real time so delays in problem solving or troubleshooting at the user or system level are
simply not an option To achieve this a VCROC (Videoconferencing Remote Operations Centre) has
been setup The VCROC consists of a set of 4 PCs with 4 displays and a videoconferencing unit
Through the VCROC operators can have a constant snapshot of the service activity proactively
intervene in case of a problem detected or interact with users for troubleshooting assistance etc
In terms of videoconferencing infrastructure some progress has also been achieved A new
MCU[14] (Multipoint Control Unit) service will be put in place during the summer of 2009 to be part
of the catalogue of services offered to the LHC A gateway is already hosted to allow users to use any
Telephone Conference system from the same H323 terminal avoiding setup and equipment
duplication
The service activity is not limited to the day-to-day operation of the LHC collaborative activity but
also to provide support consultancy and expertise for major events and outreach activities The service
members have been actively involved and sometimes leading the setup of the big events for the LHC
start-up namely the LHC Beam Day [22] and the LHC Grid Fest [21] Moreover the Team is
providing expertise to all the Experimentsrsquo special projects in the Collaborative Tools domain such as
the CMS Centres Worldwide project [5]
Figure 3 CMS centre at CERN (Meyrin)
24 Technology Research amp Indico Integration
In parallel with all the activities described above several initiatives took place to analyze the market
trends technologies vendors applications and related services in the Unified Communications and
rich media conferencing and collaborative fields In short the idea is to be in close contact with the
initiatives in the commercial world and directions taken By tightening partnerships with commercial
vendors some results have been already achieved general guidelines for service and setup
specifications high quality endpoint tests and pilots such as Telepresence[23] and new scalable codec
implementations for Desktops (such as H264-SVC)[24]
This ongoing assessment has also produced another immediate conclusion large dispersed
communities such as the LHC will probably not converge to one single collaborative tool as the
multiplicity of use cases scenarios bandwidths available endpoint setups etc will make this task
very difficult if not impossible From the end user point of view this finding implies that any Unified
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
4
Communication scenario is provided with an additional degree of customization where all the
underlying collaborative technologies and the associated resources can be operated managed and used
in a transparent way For the LHC the customization layer has been early identified that should be
provided by Indico Management system [18]
The Integrated Digital Conference (Indico) software is a web‐based multi‐platform conference
lifecycle management system and agenda It has also become the long term archiving tool for
documents and metadata related to all kinds of events that take place at CERN and LHC at large The
software is used in production at CERN (hosting gt65000 events and around 10000 visitors per day)
and in more than 50 institutes worldwide Due to this high interest the expectations on the tool are
high being permanently under heavy development providing grounds for the establishment of many
challenging RampD projects
Figure 4 New Indico interface to be in production during 2009
Concerning collaborative tools integration the first prototype has been developed and will be put in
production during the summer of 2009 The future versions of Indico will allow the user to book and
start collaborative resources such as EVO[13] or an MCU and start the remote session by pushing a
software button at the time of the meeting
Figure 5 Collaborative Tools integration in Indico
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
5
The next step will be to add the necessary intelligence to Indico (using remote agents) allowing the
automatic management of the remote session (automatic start if the user wishes)
3 New Challenges
31 Standard Collaborative Environment
The communication challenges of the LHC are considered critical for the success of the collaboration
and the efforts to address them didnrsquot come from nothing As mentioned above several important
initiatives have been taken to survey the collaborations in order to help clarifying the requirements
(both technical and financial) to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and to
research the latest developments offered by the scientific and commercial sectors in terms of
applications technologies and services Different collaboration surveys made inside the LHC
community have included extensive studies early in 2003 and 2004 Recently these studies have been
followed up by a general LHC-wide survey [8] performed by CERN IT on behalf of the Experiments
In an effort to consolidate information and to assess the complete requirements of the LHC
for collaborative tools the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) Project launched an RTAG (Requirements
and Technical Assessment Group) in 2004 The grouprsquos findings and recommendations were
presented in a final report [3] endorsed by the LHC experiments This report has been summarized
and presented at numerous international conferences including CHEP 2006 in Mumbai India [9]
Recently in order to follow-up the work already done by RTAG 12 and other previous boards and to
clarify and standardize the Collaborative Environment for the LHC the LCEB[15] (LHC
Collaborative Environments Board) has been created with extended representation from a variety of
other physics Labs to include videoconferencing expertise and representation of the remote users
LCEB is replacing RCTF and given the additional charge of following up the surveys and assessments
in order to draft a standard collaborative environment solution both in technical and financial terms
supported by all parties involved The problem under discussion is clear in exchange of funding the
Experiments would like an integrated collaborative environment for the LHC to be established and
handled through CERN IT with some degree of control over the service development priorities in
order to assure that the LHC issues receive the necessary support In addition provided that the
funding comes from the Experiments the sharing of costs should reflect its measured usage
32 Assessing the LHC Needs
The first task of LCEB is to gather and agree on a set of requirements These requirements are
intended to drive the assessment CERN IT is carrying out in order to compare the current tools in use
at the LHC collaborations with other systems on the market and come up with a standardized offer
which will be well suited for all the users and funded transparently by the LHC community It is well
understood that any change in the current collaborative environment will have to be the result of a
careful maturation process and wont be done over night The next steps of the process will be a test
phase (limited to the systems that fulfil the agreed requirements) and finalized by issuing a
recommendation
4 Summary
Important progress has been made over the past two years in the design planning development and
deployment of collaborative tools supporting the LHC The current state of the infrastructure is not
comparable to what existed only a few years ago at CERN The general feedback about this progress
from the Experiments is very positive The major recommendations of the RTAG 12 on Collaborative
Tools have either been addressed or currently being followed up a professional service has been set
up to handle requests and to intervene quickly for problem resolution the set of the most common
meeting venues at CERN are equipped professionally for audio and videoconference with some
additional to come in 2009 More generally the majority of meetings held by the Experiments are
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
6
broadcast[20] or recorded in one form or another allowing participation by all members of the
collaborations including important presentations seminars and tutorials an integrated environment is
being designed and put in place in the form of a common customized interface that will support all the
collaborative tool services and activities under its umbrella most importantly the central coordination
of CERN IT is providing project management and accountability critically important to define a path
for the Experiments for technical specifications and viable financial agreements for the services
required
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the CERN IT Department and the Experiment
Resource Coordinators and Representatives for supporting all the work done in the field of
Collaborative Tools for the LHC In addition the author would like to thank the IT-UDS Group
Leader and IT-UDS-AVC Section Leader for all the support and guidance Finally a special thanks to
Knut Bjorkli and David Martin Clavo for the huge amount of work done
References
[1] RCTF Remote Collaboration Task Force was a body chaired by CERN-IT UDS with
representation from that group and the LHC collaborationsin charge of the development and
installation of collaborative tools at CERN in support of the experiments
[2] Collaborative Tools and the LHC An Update S Goldfarb Proceedings of the International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of
Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082002
[3] Report of the LHC Computing Grid Project RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools S Goldfarb et
al CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-07 (2005)
[4] Virtual Room Videoconferencing System Developed by the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) Replaced by EVO in 2008
[5] CMS Centres Worldwide a New Collaborative Infrastructure L Taylor Oral Presentation
Collaborative Tools Session CHEP 2009
[6] Opportunities for Use and Development of Collaborative Tools in ATLAS S Goldfarb et
al ATL-GEN-2003-002 (2003)
[7] VRVS User Community Survey Results March 2004
[8] CERN Remote Collaborative Tools Survey October 2008
[9] LCG RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools for the LHC S Goldfarb Proceedings to International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Mumbai 2006 McMillian
India Ltd Vol I421-425 (2006)
[10] Shaping Collaboration 2006 a joint workshop held Dec 11-13 2006 with participation by the
Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments and LHC Users
[11] Shaping Collaboration 2006 Action Items for the LHC S Goldfarb J Herr HA Neal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear
Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082003
[12] CERN Videoconference Rooms web site of Audiovisual and Collaborative Services
[13] EVO Enabling Virtual Organizations is video conferencing system designed for HEP
capable of connecting a variety of clients including H323 It succeeds VRVS
[14] CERN MCU is an MCU-based H323 video conferencing system supported by CERN IT to be
put in production during the summer of 2009
[15] LCEB LHC Collaborative Environments Board is a body chaired by CERNIT UDS and
containing representation from that group the LHC experiments other physics laboratories
and expertise in video conferencing
[16] Succesful Video Communication CISCO White Paper Jan 2009
[17] H323 and SIP are the industry standard protocols for video and audio conferencing
[18] Indico is an Event Management System used to manage meetings and conferences (such as
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
7
CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
8
Communication scenario is provided with an additional degree of customization where all the
underlying collaborative technologies and the associated resources can be operated managed and used
in a transparent way For the LHC the customization layer has been early identified that should be
provided by Indico Management system [18]
The Integrated Digital Conference (Indico) software is a web‐based multi‐platform conference
lifecycle management system and agenda It has also become the long term archiving tool for
documents and metadata related to all kinds of events that take place at CERN and LHC at large The
software is used in production at CERN (hosting gt65000 events and around 10000 visitors per day)
and in more than 50 institutes worldwide Due to this high interest the expectations on the tool are
high being permanently under heavy development providing grounds for the establishment of many
challenging RampD projects
Figure 4 New Indico interface to be in production during 2009
Concerning collaborative tools integration the first prototype has been developed and will be put in
production during the summer of 2009 The future versions of Indico will allow the user to book and
start collaborative resources such as EVO[13] or an MCU and start the remote session by pushing a
software button at the time of the meeting
Figure 5 Collaborative Tools integration in Indico
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
5
The next step will be to add the necessary intelligence to Indico (using remote agents) allowing the
automatic management of the remote session (automatic start if the user wishes)
3 New Challenges
31 Standard Collaborative Environment
The communication challenges of the LHC are considered critical for the success of the collaboration
and the efforts to address them didnrsquot come from nothing As mentioned above several important
initiatives have been taken to survey the collaborations in order to help clarifying the requirements
(both technical and financial) to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and to
research the latest developments offered by the scientific and commercial sectors in terms of
applications technologies and services Different collaboration surveys made inside the LHC
community have included extensive studies early in 2003 and 2004 Recently these studies have been
followed up by a general LHC-wide survey [8] performed by CERN IT on behalf of the Experiments
In an effort to consolidate information and to assess the complete requirements of the LHC
for collaborative tools the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) Project launched an RTAG (Requirements
and Technical Assessment Group) in 2004 The grouprsquos findings and recommendations were
presented in a final report [3] endorsed by the LHC experiments This report has been summarized
and presented at numerous international conferences including CHEP 2006 in Mumbai India [9]
Recently in order to follow-up the work already done by RTAG 12 and other previous boards and to
clarify and standardize the Collaborative Environment for the LHC the LCEB[15] (LHC
Collaborative Environments Board) has been created with extended representation from a variety of
other physics Labs to include videoconferencing expertise and representation of the remote users
LCEB is replacing RCTF and given the additional charge of following up the surveys and assessments
in order to draft a standard collaborative environment solution both in technical and financial terms
supported by all parties involved The problem under discussion is clear in exchange of funding the
Experiments would like an integrated collaborative environment for the LHC to be established and
handled through CERN IT with some degree of control over the service development priorities in
order to assure that the LHC issues receive the necessary support In addition provided that the
funding comes from the Experiments the sharing of costs should reflect its measured usage
32 Assessing the LHC Needs
The first task of LCEB is to gather and agree on a set of requirements These requirements are
intended to drive the assessment CERN IT is carrying out in order to compare the current tools in use
at the LHC collaborations with other systems on the market and come up with a standardized offer
which will be well suited for all the users and funded transparently by the LHC community It is well
understood that any change in the current collaborative environment will have to be the result of a
careful maturation process and wont be done over night The next steps of the process will be a test
phase (limited to the systems that fulfil the agreed requirements) and finalized by issuing a
recommendation
4 Summary
Important progress has been made over the past two years in the design planning development and
deployment of collaborative tools supporting the LHC The current state of the infrastructure is not
comparable to what existed only a few years ago at CERN The general feedback about this progress
from the Experiments is very positive The major recommendations of the RTAG 12 on Collaborative
Tools have either been addressed or currently being followed up a professional service has been set
up to handle requests and to intervene quickly for problem resolution the set of the most common
meeting venues at CERN are equipped professionally for audio and videoconference with some
additional to come in 2009 More generally the majority of meetings held by the Experiments are
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
6
broadcast[20] or recorded in one form or another allowing participation by all members of the
collaborations including important presentations seminars and tutorials an integrated environment is
being designed and put in place in the form of a common customized interface that will support all the
collaborative tool services and activities under its umbrella most importantly the central coordination
of CERN IT is providing project management and accountability critically important to define a path
for the Experiments for technical specifications and viable financial agreements for the services
required
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the CERN IT Department and the Experiment
Resource Coordinators and Representatives for supporting all the work done in the field of
Collaborative Tools for the LHC In addition the author would like to thank the IT-UDS Group
Leader and IT-UDS-AVC Section Leader for all the support and guidance Finally a special thanks to
Knut Bjorkli and David Martin Clavo for the huge amount of work done
References
[1] RCTF Remote Collaboration Task Force was a body chaired by CERN-IT UDS with
representation from that group and the LHC collaborationsin charge of the development and
installation of collaborative tools at CERN in support of the experiments
[2] Collaborative Tools and the LHC An Update S Goldfarb Proceedings of the International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of
Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082002
[3] Report of the LHC Computing Grid Project RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools S Goldfarb et
al CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-07 (2005)
[4] Virtual Room Videoconferencing System Developed by the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) Replaced by EVO in 2008
[5] CMS Centres Worldwide a New Collaborative Infrastructure L Taylor Oral Presentation
Collaborative Tools Session CHEP 2009
[6] Opportunities for Use and Development of Collaborative Tools in ATLAS S Goldfarb et
al ATL-GEN-2003-002 (2003)
[7] VRVS User Community Survey Results March 2004
[8] CERN Remote Collaborative Tools Survey October 2008
[9] LCG RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools for the LHC S Goldfarb Proceedings to International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Mumbai 2006 McMillian
India Ltd Vol I421-425 (2006)
[10] Shaping Collaboration 2006 a joint workshop held Dec 11-13 2006 with participation by the
Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments and LHC Users
[11] Shaping Collaboration 2006 Action Items for the LHC S Goldfarb J Herr HA Neal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear
Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082003
[12] CERN Videoconference Rooms web site of Audiovisual and Collaborative Services
[13] EVO Enabling Virtual Organizations is video conferencing system designed for HEP
capable of connecting a variety of clients including H323 It succeeds VRVS
[14] CERN MCU is an MCU-based H323 video conferencing system supported by CERN IT to be
put in production during the summer of 2009
[15] LCEB LHC Collaborative Environments Board is a body chaired by CERNIT UDS and
containing representation from that group the LHC experiments other physics laboratories
and expertise in video conferencing
[16] Succesful Video Communication CISCO White Paper Jan 2009
[17] H323 and SIP are the industry standard protocols for video and audio conferencing
[18] Indico is an Event Management System used to manage meetings and conferences (such as
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
7
CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
8
The next step will be to add the necessary intelligence to Indico (using remote agents) allowing the
automatic management of the remote session (automatic start if the user wishes)
3 New Challenges
31 Standard Collaborative Environment
The communication challenges of the LHC are considered critical for the success of the collaboration
and the efforts to address them didnrsquot come from nothing As mentioned above several important
initiatives have been taken to survey the collaborations in order to help clarifying the requirements
(both technical and financial) to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and to
research the latest developments offered by the scientific and commercial sectors in terms of
applications technologies and services Different collaboration surveys made inside the LHC
community have included extensive studies early in 2003 and 2004 Recently these studies have been
followed up by a general LHC-wide survey [8] performed by CERN IT on behalf of the Experiments
In an effort to consolidate information and to assess the complete requirements of the LHC
for collaborative tools the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) Project launched an RTAG (Requirements
and Technical Assessment Group) in 2004 The grouprsquos findings and recommendations were
presented in a final report [3] endorsed by the LHC experiments This report has been summarized
and presented at numerous international conferences including CHEP 2006 in Mumbai India [9]
Recently in order to follow-up the work already done by RTAG 12 and other previous boards and to
clarify and standardize the Collaborative Environment for the LHC the LCEB[15] (LHC
Collaborative Environments Board) has been created with extended representation from a variety of
other physics Labs to include videoconferencing expertise and representation of the remote users
LCEB is replacing RCTF and given the additional charge of following up the surveys and assessments
in order to draft a standard collaborative environment solution both in technical and financial terms
supported by all parties involved The problem under discussion is clear in exchange of funding the
Experiments would like an integrated collaborative environment for the LHC to be established and
handled through CERN IT with some degree of control over the service development priorities in
order to assure that the LHC issues receive the necessary support In addition provided that the
funding comes from the Experiments the sharing of costs should reflect its measured usage
32 Assessing the LHC Needs
The first task of LCEB is to gather and agree on a set of requirements These requirements are
intended to drive the assessment CERN IT is carrying out in order to compare the current tools in use
at the LHC collaborations with other systems on the market and come up with a standardized offer
which will be well suited for all the users and funded transparently by the LHC community It is well
understood that any change in the current collaborative environment will have to be the result of a
careful maturation process and wont be done over night The next steps of the process will be a test
phase (limited to the systems that fulfil the agreed requirements) and finalized by issuing a
recommendation
4 Summary
Important progress has been made over the past two years in the design planning development and
deployment of collaborative tools supporting the LHC The current state of the infrastructure is not
comparable to what existed only a few years ago at CERN The general feedback about this progress
from the Experiments is very positive The major recommendations of the RTAG 12 on Collaborative
Tools have either been addressed or currently being followed up a professional service has been set
up to handle requests and to intervene quickly for problem resolution the set of the most common
meeting venues at CERN are equipped professionally for audio and videoconference with some
additional to come in 2009 More generally the majority of meetings held by the Experiments are
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
6
broadcast[20] or recorded in one form or another allowing participation by all members of the
collaborations including important presentations seminars and tutorials an integrated environment is
being designed and put in place in the form of a common customized interface that will support all the
collaborative tool services and activities under its umbrella most importantly the central coordination
of CERN IT is providing project management and accountability critically important to define a path
for the Experiments for technical specifications and viable financial agreements for the services
required
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the CERN IT Department and the Experiment
Resource Coordinators and Representatives for supporting all the work done in the field of
Collaborative Tools for the LHC In addition the author would like to thank the IT-UDS Group
Leader and IT-UDS-AVC Section Leader for all the support and guidance Finally a special thanks to
Knut Bjorkli and David Martin Clavo for the huge amount of work done
References
[1] RCTF Remote Collaboration Task Force was a body chaired by CERN-IT UDS with
representation from that group and the LHC collaborationsin charge of the development and
installation of collaborative tools at CERN in support of the experiments
[2] Collaborative Tools and the LHC An Update S Goldfarb Proceedings of the International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of
Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082002
[3] Report of the LHC Computing Grid Project RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools S Goldfarb et
al CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-07 (2005)
[4] Virtual Room Videoconferencing System Developed by the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) Replaced by EVO in 2008
[5] CMS Centres Worldwide a New Collaborative Infrastructure L Taylor Oral Presentation
Collaborative Tools Session CHEP 2009
[6] Opportunities for Use and Development of Collaborative Tools in ATLAS S Goldfarb et
al ATL-GEN-2003-002 (2003)
[7] VRVS User Community Survey Results March 2004
[8] CERN Remote Collaborative Tools Survey October 2008
[9] LCG RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools for the LHC S Goldfarb Proceedings to International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Mumbai 2006 McMillian
India Ltd Vol I421-425 (2006)
[10] Shaping Collaboration 2006 a joint workshop held Dec 11-13 2006 with participation by the
Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments and LHC Users
[11] Shaping Collaboration 2006 Action Items for the LHC S Goldfarb J Herr HA Neal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear
Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082003
[12] CERN Videoconference Rooms web site of Audiovisual and Collaborative Services
[13] EVO Enabling Virtual Organizations is video conferencing system designed for HEP
capable of connecting a variety of clients including H323 It succeeds VRVS
[14] CERN MCU is an MCU-based H323 video conferencing system supported by CERN IT to be
put in production during the summer of 2009
[15] LCEB LHC Collaborative Environments Board is a body chaired by CERNIT UDS and
containing representation from that group the LHC experiments other physics laboratories
and expertise in video conferencing
[16] Succesful Video Communication CISCO White Paper Jan 2009
[17] H323 and SIP are the industry standard protocols for video and audio conferencing
[18] Indico is an Event Management System used to manage meetings and conferences (such as
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
7
CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
8
broadcast[20] or recorded in one form or another allowing participation by all members of the
collaborations including important presentations seminars and tutorials an integrated environment is
being designed and put in place in the form of a common customized interface that will support all the
collaborative tool services and activities under its umbrella most importantly the central coordination
of CERN IT is providing project management and accountability critically important to define a path
for the Experiments for technical specifications and viable financial agreements for the services
required
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the CERN IT Department and the Experiment
Resource Coordinators and Representatives for supporting all the work done in the field of
Collaborative Tools for the LHC In addition the author would like to thank the IT-UDS Group
Leader and IT-UDS-AVC Section Leader for all the support and guidance Finally a special thanks to
Knut Bjorkli and David Martin Clavo for the huge amount of work done
References
[1] RCTF Remote Collaboration Task Force was a body chaired by CERN-IT UDS with
representation from that group and the LHC collaborationsin charge of the development and
installation of collaborative tools at CERN in support of the experiments
[2] Collaborative Tools and the LHC An Update S Goldfarb Proceedings of the International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of
Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082002
[3] Report of the LHC Computing Grid Project RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools S Goldfarb et
al CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-07 (2005)
[4] Virtual Room Videoconferencing System Developed by the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) Replaced by EVO in 2008
[5] CMS Centres Worldwide a New Collaborative Infrastructure L Taylor Oral Presentation
Collaborative Tools Session CHEP 2009
[6] Opportunities for Use and Development of Collaborative Tools in ATLAS S Goldfarb et
al ATL-GEN-2003-002 (2003)
[7] VRVS User Community Survey Results March 2004
[8] CERN Remote Collaborative Tools Survey October 2008
[9] LCG RTAG 12 Collaborative Tools for the LHC S Goldfarb Proceedings to International
Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics Mumbai 2006 McMillian
India Ltd Vol I421-425 (2006)
[10] Shaping Collaboration 2006 a joint workshop held Dec 11-13 2006 with participation by the
Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments and LHC Users
[11] Shaping Collaboration 2006 Action Items for the LHC S Goldfarb J Herr HA Neal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear
Physics Victoria 2007 Journal of Physics Conference Series 119 (2008) 082003
[12] CERN Videoconference Rooms web site of Audiovisual and Collaborative Services
[13] EVO Enabling Virtual Organizations is video conferencing system designed for HEP
capable of connecting a variety of clients including H323 It succeeds VRVS
[14] CERN MCU is an MCU-based H323 video conferencing system supported by CERN IT to be
put in production during the summer of 2009
[15] LCEB LHC Collaborative Environments Board is a body chaired by CERNIT UDS and
containing representation from that group the LHC experiments other physics laboratories
and expertise in video conferencing
[16] Succesful Video Communication CISCO White Paper Jan 2009
[17] H323 and SIP are the industry standard protocols for video and audio conferencing
[18] Indico is an Event Management System used to manage meetings and conferences (such as
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
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CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
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CHEP) It is used for scheduling room reservation attaching documents minutes etc
[19] Indico Latest News reports development and plans for Indico
[20] The CERN Webcast Site hosts several dedicated channels broadcasting CERN events live
around the globe
[21] LHC Grid Fest CERN October 2008
[22] LHC First Beam Day September 10th 2008
[23] Tandberg Telepresence is an immersive in-person meeting experience
[24] H264-SVC stands for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the
H264MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard
[25] CERN Training Catalogue The CERN Technical Training courses are open to members of
CERN personnel (staff members and fellows associates students users project associates
etc)
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP09) IOP PublishingJournal of Physics Conference Series 219 (2010) 082006 doi1010881742-65962198082006
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