By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
October 24, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — IBM (www.ibm.com) and North Carolina State University (www.ncsu.edu) announced on Friday it plans to give all North Carolina students access to advanced educational resources through Virtual Computing Lab technology (www.ibm.com/cloud).
Through this cloud computing initiative, students at K-12 schools all the way to community colleges and the University of North Carolina system campuses across the state will have access to the most advanced educational computational materials, select software applications and computing and storage resources.
NC State has made the code for its VCL technology freely available through the Apache open source community. The school is also in talks with various universities around the world that wish to replicate this cloud computing model.
The NC State Department of Computer Science, Office of Information Technology and IBM have also created the Center of Excellence in Cloud Computing, an applied research and development facility on the NC State campus that that will lead collaboration projects between NC State and the IBM “Blue Cloud” development team. The team will help to improve the quality of education provided through the VCL platform.
The VCL solution enables users to remotely access software applications, operating systems and environments through license-honoring technology via the Internet. They can choose from a range of options, including single desktops, classroom-sized labs, groups of servers and other resources, and high-performance computing clusters.
“NC State and IBM are inviting universities worldwide to participate in the Virtual Computing Initiative,” says Jai Menon, vice president of IBM University Programs and vice chair of the IBM Academy of Technology. “Through this collaboration, universities which participate in this program have a tremendous opportunity to not only further enable their own students, but to also improve the lives of students in economically disadvantaged parts of the country and the world. The VCL technology is a conduit that can greatly enhance students’ education, self confidence and overall quality of life.”
University and community college students can use VCL to access high-end applications such as SolidWorks, MatLab and SAS, as well as complex networking simulators, mainframe computing facilities running IBM System z, and specialized IBM’s Cell microprocessors.
Through the same system elementary school students can access age-suitable content such as educational software that provides games, animation and storytelling.
The content is projected through the VCL images, which consist of an operating system and set of prepackaged applications, middleware or other material that is securely stored in the cloud.
Once a session ends and the user has saved the desired data, the user’s “virtual space”, which had been running on blade servers with hypervisors, is completely erased, which enables the computing resources to be re-provisioned by other users as needed.
The cloud computing solution at NC State consists mostly of IBM BladeCenter servers, as well as storage and software that can be shared by geographically distributed users.
NC State hopes that by forming the Center of Excellence in Cloud Computing, the school will be among the first to implement cloud computing technology to improve the quality of education for students in North Carolina and around the world.
The center will serve as the foundation for many ongoing cloud computing research projects being conducted at NC State and other local universities.
IBM and NC State collaborated to establish the VCL in 2004. Since then, IBM and several other corporations and active support from NC State, University of North Carolina, General Administration and state legislature, have helped expand the VCL.
They have received additional technical support from IBM BladeCenter development teams in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and sustained funding from the IBM RTP Center for Advanced Studies and IBM corporate university relations.
As part of its Cloud Computing Initiative, IBM has built 13 cloud computing centers around the world, including four new centers in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bangalore, India; Seoul, Korea and Hanoi, Vietnam.
For many of these projects IBM has partnered with universities and other organizations, including collaborating with Google to teach university students how to program cloud applications, and partnering up with Georgia Institute of Technology and Ohio State University to develop new autonomic technology for cloud computing.
IBM and NC State will demonstrate the VCL solution at Educause 2008 in Orlando from October 28 to 31, and at Supercomputing 2008 in Austin from November 15 to 21.
Schools can download the VCL appliance here, as well as learn more about joining the Virtual Computing Initiative by visiting here or here.
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