Internet2 > IDEA Awards > 2009 Awards

IDEA Award Winner 2009

Enabling Virtual Organizations (EVO)

EVO, developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a videoconferencing and desktop sharing system designed to provide a seamless real-time collaboration platform for bridging remotely located collaborators and resources in support of science and research. Originally designed to meet the unique and demanding needs of the High Energy Physics (HEP) community, EVO is today in wide and continual use by thousands of collaborators in many disciplines, as well as by many groups of educators and students worldwide.

The EVO architecture emerged from over ten years of development and large-scale operation of collaborative tools, and Caltech’s unique communications fabric for high-performance messaging, pervasive monitoring and autonomous control of global-scale systems called MonALISA (monalisa.caltech.edu). EVO allows users throughout a worldwide scientific collaboration to integrate standards-based collaboration into all phases of their daily work, whether working on desktops or laptops with any of the major operating systems, in conference rooms using standard videoconferencing equipment, in experimental control rooms or auditoriums.

Through the use of intelligent agents, EVO automatically directs the data streams, optimally interlinks the sites participating in a conference, and moderates the flows and their quality to accommodate a wide range of network conditions. This provides round the clock non-stop system operations supporting many thousands of users, with a minimum of human intervention. On the client side, EVO supports a wide range of audio, video and display devices, including support for HD (1080i) sessions on mass market PC systems with large single or multiple screens at low cost. EVO’s OpenGL-based 3D VIEVO interface has the unique capability of handling a wide variety of real-time high-resolution video, audio and other content in the form of “objects” for state-of-the-art scientific collaborative sessions.