The Institute of Graphics and Parallel Processing (GUP) at the Johannes Kepler University Linz is well-known for its expertise in combining computer graphics with parallel and distributed processing. For all these research topics, GUP has established a significant degree of expertise and provides a corresponding body of computing hardware (including Austria’s largest Virtual Reality Centre VRC@JKU). The research of GUP in this area is described in more than 200 journal and conferences papers on topics including high-performance rendering, scientific visualization, parallel and distributed computer graphics, and visualization on the Grid. GUP is engaged in several national efforts, such as the Austrian Centre for Parallel Computing, the Austrian Grid Consortium, and national and international research projects, such as the EU Project EGEE – Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (INFSO 508833), and the EU Project CrossGrid (IST-2001-32243).

The Grid Visualization Kernel (GVK), the Grid Video Services and glogin developed by GUP represent sophisticated middleware extension for interactive visualization services, video streaming on the Grid, and interactive access to Grid resources. A first prototype of GVK is being applied within the EU CrossGrid project for biomedical applications, concentrating on one particular graphical representation within the VTK environment.

GUP will also play a strong role in WP5 to complement the expertise needed for edutain@grid. GUP has a strong scientific history to develop and maintain academic Grid infrastructure such as the Austrian Grid which covers the entire country of Austria supporting currently close to 20 application groups with approximately 300 CPUs distributed over several cities within Austria. GUP has strong experience in porting applications onto the Grid and will thus support the application groups within WP5 in their effort to port applications onto the Grid. GUP will help Amis to provide a modern Grid infrastructure based on existing hoster environment of Amis and various computers provided by other edutain@grid partners. GUP will work on the development and testing procedures and plays an important role for quality assurance. GUP will also support the application groups in edutain@grid to port their applications onto the Grid.