On Developing Indonesian Access Grid and its Virtual Reality Applications

This paper reviews the area of grid computing in relation to virtual reality. The purpose of this paper is to describe our work on the visualization of an areas using virtual reality technology. Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) was used in this work, and Access Grid was used for data sharing in a grid computing environment to support collaborative work. Access Grid is a tool which supports the interaction and collaboration which provide applications such as video conferencing, data sharing, shared applications, and shared services. In this work the shared VRML files developed depict a lake area surrounded by mountains. We created some 3D-diagrams which show several parameters to support a kind of teleimmersive decision support system. Access Grid is used for data sharing in this work and became the framework used in developing a grid computing environment. The advancement of grid computing technology has been reviewed in this work. We discuss our work in developing a virtual reality model, installing University of Indonesia Access Grid Node (UI AGN), and creating a VRML design. We also conducted the performance evaluation of the system. Finally, our performance evaluation shows that during the data sharing mechanism using Access Grid, the average number of packets sent per second is between 8.979518 < μ < 9.298282 for uploading process and the average number of packets received 25.16244 < μ < 28.78776 for downloading process.