Our congratulations to the following people who have been awarded an Innovation Grant in the first round for 2007.

Development Grants

Charles Sturt University - James Bekkema
Multithreaded Game Engine (MTGE)

The proposed project is the continuation of the Game Engine project that started with a 2004 AUC seed grant.

This project is used to teach the structure and functions of games engines within CSU, to both Computer Science (Games Technology) students, and to other interested parties. One of its primary purposes is as a teaching vehicle in game engine implementation. Its modular structure makes it ideal to illustrate and implement particular aspects of game programming. The multithreaded design demonstrates how to approach the challenge of correctly developing a game engine to make the most of modern hardware.

The project has high relevance beyond our own University. Games courses in Computer Science have proliferated at Australian universities recently (http://www.gdaa.com.au/careers/courses.html), and our engine is well suited to provide a base for student game programming projects, or experimental technology implementations. We intend to make the project available as an open-source development project.

Grffith University - Paul Draper
Systemic development for eLearning and eResearch in the digital arts

Overall, the project responds to two development perspectives: academic and technical.

i) Academic relevance: Develops learning and teaching design, and assessment practices around ‚ new literacies, ie, the development and production of podcasts and radio programs by students to effectively review and critique their works and that of peers. In this case, in lieu of text-based assignments. Part of the project outcomes will include lesson plans, problem-based learning models, exemplars and assessment criteria as it relates to developing multimedia content using Apple iLife applications in the student labs and multimedia studios. This process is seen as transferable to creative research outputs for those academics working in the digital arts environment.

ii) Technical relevance: Learning Management Systems, online galleries of student work and electronic collaboration spaces all suffer from a variety of bottlenecks that prevent user contributed content being published in a cost effective, timely and controlled fashion in consistent formats suitable for delivery to a wide variety of devices.

This project will integrate a Serverside Encoding System(SES) for continuous media (audio/video) uploaded via the web using a Content Management System (CMS). The continuous media will be transcoded into a variety of formats suitable for delivery via podcasts and/or as a hinted stream using QuickTime Streaming Server(QTSS). The CMS will be integrated with QTSS in such a fashion that users will be able to create, edit and control playlists via the web. Both the CMS and QTSS will in turn draw their user information from an Apple Open Directory. The resulting integrated system will therefore be referred to as a Serverside Encoding System and CMS integration for QuickTime Streaming Server (SES/CMS4QTSS)

Monash University - Ashley Buckle
PXgrid: An application for distributed protein crystallography using Xgrid

Leading Australian universities have internationally competitive structural biology research programs that offer biochemistry and biomedical undergraduate and graduate courses in which structural biology is a central theme. Our software will promote the use of Macintosh and OS X in scientific areas such as structural biology, bioinformatics, genomics and systems biology, areas in which Apple is currently under-represented. Scientific teaching using our application running on Mac OS X will promote the simplicity and ease of using Apple technology for serious scientific endeavours. We envisage that in the long term we will invest in XServe technology to evolve these projects. ‘Big science’ such as structural genomics is making a serious impact on medical science and is filtering down to university courses. PXgrid will be used by Honours and PhD students in their research projects.

University of Adelaide - Luke Toop
Departmental Newscasting with Distributed Authoring

University departments are deploying large format LCD/Plasma displays in order to improve communication with students and to inform visitors of exciting recent developments in research and other activities. However, there is a surprising dearth of software to support this task. At one extreme, professional video production is an alternative, but is usually prohibitively expensive. Instead, University departments typically use an ad hoc approach based around producing videos in PowerPoint (or Keynote) then using some means (often a screen saver) to display the video in a continuous loop. Neither this nor the professional video approach provides an efficient workflow whereby individuals can add new stories as things happen, which is essential to keep the published information fresh and exciting. The key contributions of this project will be support for efficient publishing (as things happen) via a web application and a purpose built display engine that is inherently more robust than a re-purposed screen saver.

University of Canberra - George Bray
RAIT - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Transcoders

We propose to develop a method whereby idle Macintosh computers on university campuses can participate in the task of transcoding MPEG-2 video to streamable H.264 video. Using existing Apple technologies (Xgrid, QuickTime, AppleScript, AFP) and open source applications (VLC, bash, ssh, kerberos) this project will enable a single university to use Macs on different subnets to prepare recorded video (typically broadcast television) for on-demand streaming.

UCTV's Virtual Video Recorder (http://uctv.canberra.edu.au/vvr/) is a network application available to staff and students where they can record any of the 40+ broadcast TV channels running on the campus multicast network. This pilot system uses Automator, AppleScript, QuickTime and VLC to encode recordings to streamable video. The popularity of this system now requires a grid-based solution to encode the enormous amounts of video recordings.

More than 20 of these channels are available across AARNet3, Internet2 and European Research networks now, so any institution with access to these networks that wants to record programs from the streams for later replay could benefit from the proposed transcoding solution.

There are existing solutions for transcoding video using a grid of computers, but these have limitations in our scenario. Our scenario is we have our Virtual Video Recorder in use on our campus network, and it produces large volumes of content that need to be compressed and prepared for streaming. We want to use the idle capacity of our Mac labs to process this media.

Apple's video production suite Final Cut Pro has the ability to share the transcoding using Compressor on a network of Macs that exist all on the same network segment (subnet).

Apple's Xgrid system can also be used for distributed processing with custom scripts and applications.

Both of these solutions, however, can't be used to incorporate the hundreds of Macs on other subnets throughout the university.

The RAIT development is applicable to every educational institution that wishes to make use of latent processing power in their own Macintosh labs. As other institutions begin to implement multicast television on their networks, they will also have the problem of the large processing requirement to make recordings more efficient and usable.

University of Melbourne - Mohammad Tabbara
Development platform for wireless networked control systems

To demonstrate through a proof-of-concept platform that Networked Control Systems can be designed in a systematic and practical manner with guaranteed levels of performance, robustness and with existing networking technologies; to act as a "proving" ground for new NCS ideas (new network protocols, different ways of distributing computation, different control laws) to illustrate that NCS design can be easy and fun and to support research students' work and act as teaching tool for advanced undergraduate students.

NCS are receiving considerable attention in research communities across the world, and, in particular the ANU and University of Newcastle in addition to The University of Melbourne are undertaking projects relevant to NCS. We believe that the software and ideas developed as part of this project will be relevant to these institutions' teaching and research activities in NCS and control theory in general.

University of Queensland - Ian Duncan
Apple / Sun SAM-FS/QFS Combined Infrastructure Project

The Apple/Sun SAM-FS/QFS effort is a major infrastructure project marrying the performance, resilience and enterprise class storage hardware of Sun Microsystems with Apple desktop and server environments, primarily Mac OS X Leopard client and server.

As Sun make further inroads into the education sector, storage integration with diverse and varied desktop infrastructure becomes critical. It is important that infrastructure designers in the education sector realise that they can still take advantage of Apple manageability, configuration and ease of deployment, whilst having peace of mind with true HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) systems.

Our project is the first in Australia to attempt to combine the Sun SAM-FS/QFS HSM storage model with a networked home Apple desktop user experience. We will be able to offer true instantaneous metadata based restoration of files, using snapshots and fast i-node tree recovery techniques, alongside next generation filesystem technologies such as ZFS.

The model also affords high availability, with a failover component allowing demand based restoration of files, in the event that a fileserver head is damaged or loses functionality.

We envision this project to be of use to any large departments or educational/research institutions where the nature of storage and recovery is mission critical, moreover, the ability to expand storage capacity and recover archived data back to the Mac OS X desktop in a timely manner is paramount. Common applications of such a large storage environments include mechanical/mechatronic engineering physics models, magnetic resonance imaging data, flow cytometry data and high resolution PET scanners. In situations like these, the common Mac OS X desktop user needs to have the potential to dump to a multi-terabyte environment and have assurance that the data itself is mirrored instantly in another location. Our infrastructure will provide such assurance.

University of Queensland - Ariel Liebman
Migration of Plexos Energy System Modelling Software to Mac platform

The Plexos energy market simulation system (www.energyexemplar.com)is a product that is used both in industry for studying the impacts of deregulation on electricity systems and incorporates the ability to model emissions trading markets. It is used in most major electricity systems around the world including Australia, USA, Europe and the USSR. The price models it produces are used to make investment decisions in projects exceeding $1 Billion. With over 50 clients worldwide it is the only Australian develop product to have such a world wide reach. Additionally, due to it's excellent academic foundations (it has been built by a operations research PhD graduate Dr. Glenn Drayton), it would also be a tremendous teaching tools for instructing engineering, economics and business students in the modelling of electricity markets and the impacts of greenhouse gas reduction schemes.

Plexos as it stands however, since it has been developed on the windows platform, and specifically for industry use, is not easily used for educational purposes except at postgraduate level. We propose the migrating it to the MacOS platform and simplifying its interface using Apple's UI design principles will tremendously enhance its educational potential.

Additionally, we aim to prove that Apple's Quad Core macpro PC provides the best high-performance platform for such highly computationally intensive. In the energy sector, the platform for computationally intensive applications is dominated by the intel/windows platform. Plexos is extremely computationally intensive but has already been partially optimised for multiple CPU operation.

University of Western Australia - Paul Bourke
Evaluating the creation of a single large digital canvas

There are a number of possible benefits to AUC members of large digital displays.

1. Visualisation of geometry rich datasets. These are datasets that one wishes to view in their entirety in order to detect global structure but for which there is more data than available pixels.

2. Viewing/inspection of high resolution images. For example geographical survey, Hubble deep field, and remote imaging. Such high resolution images are increasingly common given the recent improvements in imaging CCD chips.

3. Immersive displays for virtual reality style environments/experiences. There are applications of such environments for engaged learning and training.

4. Engaging displays for public education, artistic works, and entertainment.

University of Wollongong - Phillip McKerrow
Software Development for Sun SPOT embedded microcontroller on Macintosh

The Sun Spot Java embedded microcontroller opens up new opportunities for developing and teaching embedded applications. The development tools provided by Sun are compatible with Windows XP with Java runtime, PPC Mac OS X 10.4 or better and most common Linux distributions. This project will enable universities to use the Sun SPOT for both teaching and research using Mac OSX and XCode by being an exemplar of what is possible.

Many people have told me that you don't develop embedded systems on Macintosh. This project will demonstrate that the Macintosh is a viable system for developing embedded systems.

In the area of teaching, subjects in real-time computing and programming of input/output are usually taught either with PIC processor and assembler or the TINI processor and Java. Interest in these subjects has wained because the field has been relatively static. The Sun SPOT is an exciting new development that has the potential to become the main system used in these subjects. The experience gained in this project will be available to AUC members via a web site, enabling them to choose Macintosh as a host for teaching embedded systems.

This project will provide student projects where students will use Macintosh to develop software for embedded systems.

Seeding Grants

University of Newcastle - Matthew Willis