The Access Grid is an advanced video conference system where people in different places meet in a 'virtual venue' using audio and video tools, and other shared applications, such as presentations. It is the most widely accessible application freely available in New Zealand and brings national and international connectivity to the Access Grid communities.
The Access Grid is particularly suited to group-to-group collaboration between potentially large numbers of sites. At its simplest, the Access Grid is a collection of familiar resources (projectors, cameras, microphones) linked by networked computers to enable audiovisual collaboration between remote participants: videoconferencing. However, in contrast to familiar H.323 point-to-point services or ISDN-based teleconferencing between a small number of sites, the Access Grid scales to handle large numbers of participating groups.
Just as importantly, the Access Grid provides interfaces to Grid middleware enabling the creation of new tools for collaborative visualization, data-sharing, remote control of instruments and interaction with other grid resources.
The New Zealand Access Grid community was established in New Zealand in 2006. All major universities across New Zealand currently run an Access Grid node. The Access Grid (AG) was developed by the FuturesLab at Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne National Laboratory is one of the United States Department of Energy's oldest and largest science and engineering research national laboratories.
There is no theoretical limit to how many nodes can be linked, and the number of people at each site is limited only by room size and hardware present.
Official Access Grid Website - http://www.accessgrid.org.