Shastra Collaboration Substrate

The Shastra Collaboration Substrate defines an extensible, programmable, computing environment for experimenting with sophisticated collaborative applications that support LAN and WAN based collaboration amongst multiple participants and systems. The architecture is composed of stream based collaboration aware network servers. Servers are classified into one of three categories: Fronts, which are the applications that users interact with; Session managers are specialized servers that control the interaction of Fronts; and Kernel's which act as global nameservers maintaining lists of available network resources. The architecture uses a hybrid data location scheme where network resource location information is replicated across all Kernels and session data is centrally located in Session Managers. The Shastra substrate is implemented in Java and C++. A collection of toolkits and multimedia services have been developed to demonstrate the capabilities of the Architecture. Sample toolkits are an Interactive Surface Modeling and Analysis tookit, Ganith a curve and surface manipulator, and Vistool a scientific visualization application. Multimedia services include Text, Audio, Video, and Whiteboard collaboration tools.

Collaboration Issues

The Shastra Substrate provides an experimental testbed to investigate important issues in distributed and collaborative systems. Investigations have been performed into the following areas:
Session Management Provides flexible, adaptable controls for sharing, and interacting with group resources.
Thin/Fat client support Techniques for the control of data location.
Resource Management Resource discovery, naming, and control for distributed computation.
Data Management Efficient algorithms for the control of data replication and location.

Publications and Presentations

Scientific problem solving in a distributed and collaborative multimedia environment. PS PDF
Web based collaboration aware synthetic environments. In Proc. of TeamCAD Gvu/Nist Workshop on Collaborative Design, pages 143-150, May 1997. ed. J. Rossignac. (PS PDF)
Web based Thin-Client Architecture for Collaborative Visualization (PS PDF)
Bibliography
Web based Thin-Client architecture for Collaborative Visualization
Web Based Synthetic Environments