Student participation and resulting expertise
is as valuable as having the high-performance
resource itself.
BY CAmeRon SeAY AnD GARY tuCKeR
Virtual
Computing
Initiative at
a Small Public
university
thE VirtUaL CompUtinG Lab at north Carolina
State University (nC State), established August 2004,
proved that the concept of a highly scalable, high-performance computing (HPC) resource providing on-demand applications anywhere/anytime had become
a reality in this particular educational setting.
The VCL allows platform-independent
access to a variety of computing configurations without having to maintain each one separately. This is done
through software images installed (on
demand by users) onto blade servers.
The result is a highly scalable computing environment that allows users to
use what they need when they need it.
The VCL was a groundbreaking
project, in that it used entirely open
source tools to dramatically increase
the accessibly of computing resources
for students, but the costs incurred are
beyond the means of most smaller uni-
versities. However, in light of lessons
learned, we now know that a much
more affordable implementation is
possible. Here, we offer a case study of
a follow-on VCL pilot project at North
Carolina Central University (NCCU), an
historically black college in Durham,
NC. But NCCU has less than a third the
number of students as NC State while
also being a liberal arts college (with
a science focus), not an engineering
school like NC State. By leveraging NC
State expertise, we showed that such
technology is within reach of practi-
cally any educational institution.
