Welcome to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio AccessGrid! Since joining the Internet-2 community in 2002, UTHSCSA and UTSA have implemented the AccessGrid digital videoconferencing system which uses Internet-2 for transmitting audio, video and data for a true multicast conference environment. Faculty, students and staff are able to utilize the UTHSCSA Bioinformatics Venue Server in the Biochemistry Department to host their own AccessGrid conferences with other Internet-2 peers. Commodity Internet sites not connected to Internet-2 can participate via several unicast-multicast bridges (NCSA and Argonne National Labs, as well as our own multicast bridge offered by the UTHSCSA Bioinformatics Core Facility).
We can provide secure and open virtual conference rooms for private and public meetings on our venue server. Please visit the links on this website to obtain more information about this exciting technology. Internet-2 membership was obtained thanks to a NSF grant (ANI-228927) to Dr. Borries Demeler (UTHSCSA) and Dr. Rajendra Boppana (UTSA).
AccessGrid videoconferencing is available FREE OF CHARGE to anyone with a desktop or laptop computer connected to the Internet (even roadrunner cable modem works). You can video conference from your office with a virtually unlimited number of conferencing partners anywhere in the world using the UTHSCSA AccessGrid. For example, you could broadcast live a surgery in high-definition video with crystal-clear sound to a group of students in the valley, or host a worldwide conference where your conference partners never would have to travel to Texas. You could hold your weekly lab meetings virtually, and exchange data with your collaborators. You can present powerpoint presentations to remote viewers, and several of you can work on the same application opened on your computer screen, with each one taking turns controlling the mouse. You can teach seminars, courses and workshops with rich media content to remote conference partners, and can have remote participants present to you. You can exchange data via secure SSL exchange links, and you can control who accesses your conferences and data. Do you want to record your conference for later broadcast or review? Simple: Use the AGVCR application to simultaneously save every video and audio stream to harddrive, and play it back with random access capability. Using the Bioinformatics Core Facility's mobile AccessGrid conferencing system, you can even patch in telephone conferences into the AccessGrid conference for those partners on the road that cannot get to an Internet connection. Free AccessGrid client software is available for Linux, Unix, Macintosh OSX and Microsoft Windows. We offer a hardware bundle that includes software, video camera and a microphone/headset combo for $70 that will turn your laptop or desktop PC into a fully functional AccessGrid node.
For more information please contact Borries Demeler or Jeremy Mann.