The High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) Group comprises one full professor, two associate professors, one postdoc, and five Ph.D. students. The group develops architectures, models, tools, and mechanisms to configure, instrument, monitor, and visualize the behavior and output of distributed and parallel applications on single and multi-core computers. Building on this, it does research on cross-platform collaboration between users. The approach is primarily experimental in order to capture the complex interactions between real workloads and modern technology. As its experimental platform the group has built a wall-sized 22Mpixels display wall comprised of more than 30 computers, 28 projectors, and a range of optical and audio sensors supporting a user interface using gestures and sound to interact with applications. In addition more than 50 computers are used as compute resources. The group has collaboration with Princeton University and the University of Copenhagen.

The Documentation Studies (DS) program at the UiT focuses its research on different aspects of documents, considered as any instant of communication using some media within a certain frame of time and space, ranging from speeches and concerts to homepages. DS cannot be limited to either the natural sciences, the social sciences or the humanities, it belongs to all three main traditions. The faculty of the program includes a computer scientist, 3 humanists and 2 social scientists. The department has strong international relations notably through The Document Academy, chaired by professor Niels W. Lund, Tromsø. The program participates in the Tromsø Telemedicine Laboratory, an NFR-funded center for research-based innovation. It has also for many years cooperated with the Academy of Music in Tromsø on artistic documentation and lately on experiments for the World Opera project.

The Music Conservatory at Tromsø University College has its focus on artistic production, but also research and development work. With its 6 professors, one of them in opera, and 3 research fellows in both theoretical and artistic subjects it will make valuable contributions and host research and artistic fellows in this project. At this point plans are under discussion to establish a center for opera research together with the institutes for documentation and computer sciences at UiT. The conservatory is well equipped technically and initial tests on high-speed data communication with AV music contents have been successful.

Simula Research Laboratory is a non-profit research center that performs basic research and has educational programs at master and PhD level. The Networks and Distributed Systems department’s research areas focus on QoS enabled communication infrastructure and architectures. Topics at the core of the department’s competency that are of relevance for this project include resource utilization for distributed systems and network resilience. The REPAIR group focuses on proactive fast reroute, adaptive multi-path routing and inter-domain scalability. The RELAY group focuses on quantitative improvements in resource utilization in 10 large-scale distributed systems, with investigations into distributed architectures, operating systems and protocols.

The Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo is the most comprehensive school of computer science in Norway, and it contributes to dozens of major international computer science projects. The Networks and Distributed Systems (ND) research group has a staff of 4 full time researchers and a number of part time researchers. There is also at any time a varying number of post docs and PhD scholars. ND is a leading research center (”toppforskningsmiljø”) of the University of Oslo. ND has the expertise in developing dependable solutions due to the past involvement of its personnel in a number of leading projects and standards related to fault-tolerance: the WebSphere high-availability component, fault-tolerant CORBA standard, group communication architectures, and scalable overlays.

Telenor is Norway’s leading provider of telecommunication, data and media communication services. Telenor has operations in 12 countries, more than 125 million subscribers and 34,000 employees at home and abroad. Telenor Research and Innovation (R&I), with app. 230 employees, plays an important role in planning the introduction of Telenor’s next generation services. Telenor R&I activities address areas like user/market aspects, technology and business aspects. Within the technology area, topics like architecture, mobile systems, IP-networks, access networks and media distribution are key topics. Telenor is currently participating in the EU project HIDENETS and in the network of excellence EuroFGI that are both relevant for the Verdione project.

Lividi is a start-up company in the area of Internet video streaming. Lividi is developing cost-effective solutions for video streaming to large scale Internet audiences and communities which are also able to support the increasingly wide range of devices, networks, and resource fluctuations. The Lividi technology automatically adapts the video quality to device characteristics, varying network quality, as well as user preferences providing the best possible video quality given the current constraints. The Lividi team consists of experienced MSc and PhD level software engineers and researchers who have contributed to multimedia systems since the 1990s.