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NLR Blog

Thursday, May 7, 2009

NLR Rolls out Multi-Point TelePresence Capability

NLR has successfully completed a demonstration of multi-point TelePresence, with a session linking the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) of Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Pennsylvania State University's College of Information Sciences and Technology with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).

"NLR's TelePresence Exchange and its pre-set "meeting rooms," makes it very straightforward for RENCI to take advantage of the latest in TelePresence technologies to communicate with colleagues around the country and, going forward, around the world," said Alan Blatecky, Interim Director, Renaissance Computing Institute. "While the TelePresence capability significantly reduces the need for travel and its expense, the more important value is that researchers have the ability to share ideas and explore new opportunities on a moment's notice. That's something that can't be done even through travel."

"The recent demonstration of multi-point TelePresence between PSC, Pennsylvania State University and RENCI reinforces that TelePresence is the leading-edge in live video tele-conferencing," said Wendy Huntoon, director of networking at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and NLR director of operations. "It's a clear step forward in both visual quality and ease of use. For PSC, this extends our ongoing productive collaboration with Cisco and close partnership with NLR."

NLR's TelePresence Exchange, located in Kansas City and based on Cisco technologies, can link together up to 12 different, physical locations with 3 TelePresence screens each.

For full news release on NLR's multi-point TelePresence demo, please see: http://www.nlr.net/release.php?id=42.

For more information on TelePresence and how to connect to NLR's TelePresence Exchange for point-to-point and multi-point TelePresence sessions with other TelePresence-ready institutions in the US and abroad, please see: http://www.nlr.net/telepresence-faq.php#networkready.