North Carolina State University (NCSU), with the support from IBM has developed an innovative distributed computing services infrastructure that more efficiently and effectively serves the every-day educational and research needs of its students and faculty. More importantly, the solution can also serve as the platform for providing a better educational experience to all K-12, community college and university students and educators across the state of North Carolina. This is an open architecture developed through the combined efforts of the NCSU Information Technology Division, the College of Engineering and the Friday Institute. Its current production implementation at NCSU is called the Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL). VCL can provide a broad range of computing solutions that range from K-12 in-class and homework “seats” to advanced university-level teaching and research applications, to high-performance computing (HPC). By delivering solutions on-demand through the Internet, anytime and anywhere, the VCL will substantially increase the availability of needed educational computing services and applications to North Carolina students and educators in even the most economically disadvantaged and/or remote parts of the state – and all at a much reduced cost.
To expand this model across the state and beyond, IBM and NCSU announced the “Virtual Computing Initiative” at today’s IBM University Day, an event that IBM sponsors twice a year to bring local faculty and students together to share their research. The goal of the Virtual Computing Initiative is to create a multi-institutional shared computing services community based upon the VCL model that will include universities, community colleges, K-12 schools and business partners. Through this initiative, IBM will be providing support for research into the service, applications. middleware and infrastructure innovations that the wide deployment of the architecture will require. Many of the supported activities will be in the form of open source community projects, which will make these innovations freely available to all. In addition to the founding partners, NCSU and IBM, initial participants in this joint endeavor include other North Carolina Universities, as well as several K-12 school districts. Today’s announcement invited all educational institutions to participate in the initiative.
Speaking at the event today, Sue Horn, Vice President for IBM Software Group in Research Triangle Park said, “This new lab sparked the idea for an initiative that we believe will make it easier and less expensive for students and educators across the state to access the computing power, applications and services that they will need to be successful in the classroom and in the laboratory. Because the infrastructure can be located anywhere in the state where the management resources and skills are available, this will be especially valuable to the rural or disadvantaged areas in North Carolina.”
The NCSU Virtual Computing Lab
The physical heart of the VCL is the IBM BladeCenter — which integrates servers, networks, storage and applications into highly efficient one-inch systems that sit in a rack like books on a shelf. The solution can also tap into classical computer laboratory desktops when they are not in use. The brain of the solution is the VCL resource management software developed at NCSU, incorporating IBM BladeCenter and open source technologies. NCSU is also researching the use of Tivoli Monitoring software and WebSphere middleware products for enhanced performance. In addition to monitoring the overall performance quality, research areas include using Tivoli monitoring agents to profile VCL application environments and determine which environments are suitable for dedicated blades or virtual machines. VCL allows students and faculty to tap into the power of high-end laboratories directly from their laptops or computers from anywhere on campus – or from anywhere in the world.
The VCL idea is a direct derivative of the NCSU HPC activities. Its development was initiated through, and augmented by, multiple IBM Shared University Research (SUR) equipment grants. Additionally, funding from the IBM RTP Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) has supported numerous research projects associated with the VCL. IBM software used in the lab (including the IBM Tivoli Monitoring and WebSphere Application Server middleware) was donated by the IBM Academic Initiative, a program that provides IBM software free for use in the classroom or in research, with an aim toward developing curricula that address critical industry skills.
VCL allows NCSU students or professors to request a range of computational resources — from a single computer laboratory “seat”, to a set of synchronized classroom “seats” and services, to a group of teaching or research servers, to HPC clusters. Using a secure web interface, students and faculty can request needed resources for immediate use, or they can make a short-term or longer term reservation for a time in the future. Users select from a library of ‘images’ that contain a wide variety of educational and research applications and services available on a number of operating systems, and customized to the needs of a particular course, laboratory, project, or an individual student or project. Authorized end-users are allowed to create their own images thus decentralizing and speeding up image creation and management tasks, reducing cost, and increasing user satisfaction. This is very much in the spirit of customization that is an integral part of services engineering and management. Computationally intensive applications may be given an entire blade server (or a blade group), or they may be assigned a ‘desktop” or a “server’ of equal functionality that shares resources with others through the use of a virtualization layer (often an economic solution for K-12 environments). The VCL model optimizes physical resource usage in a way that is end-user platform agnostic, and it maximizes the usage of both open source and commercial applications and solutions – a key to the economic efficiencies derived from the VCL model. The lab rooms once filled with unused computers at night are a thing of the past. Distance education students can access the same resources as on-campus students from the comfort of their dorm rooms and homes.
“We’re at the forefront of creating a completely new lab experience for our students,” said Mladen Vouk, NCSU Computer Science department head and Associate Vice-Provost for information technology (IT). “This approach will enhance the skills development of our students, as well as drive projects to advance key science and engineering areas, as well as key multidisciplinary areas such as healthcare and genetics research.”
The Virtual Computing Initiative
VCL is an economy-of-scale architecture, which means that its efficiency increases as it scales up. The initiative aims to expand the benefits of the VCL model to other university, community college, and K-12 institutions across the state – and beyond. In order to facilitate a broad adoption across the state, NCSU is offering the VCL solution as an “open architecture” model that is freely available to all. To create the consortium required to build such a shared infrastructure, NCSU and IBM are launching the ‘Virtual Computing Initiative’. NCSU and IBM are working with the other universities to help establish their own VCL clusters that will be shared across campuses.
” NCSU’s experience to date is that a provisioning level of one VCL blade per 25 students is needed for STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] courses requiring use of high end applications. As the cluster expands across disciplines and campuses and into K-12 schools and community colleges, the IBM middleware and virtualization solutions will allow that ratio to be substantially increased ,” said Sam Averitt, NCSU Vice Provost for Information Technology. “With the aid of an IBM SUR grant, NCCU has established a VCL blade cluster that will be supporting, among other things, our BRITE [Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise] research efforts. By joining this initiative, we are increasing the computational resources available to that project – as well as to all our faculty and students. We are therefore very excited about what this will mean to the educational and research opportunities on our campus,” said Greg Marrow, NCCU CIO.
In addition to contributing IBM BladeCenter servers to the shared cluster, there will be other ways in which an institution can join the Virtual Computing Initiative. Some universities may contribute open source software developed by their researchers, e.g., in the form of applications that are ideal for the distributed platform, or in the form of middleware extensions that could help with the management of the state-wide cluster. Additionally, K-12 schools and community colleges will be ‘contributing’ their students and educators in various educational projects. IBM will be supporting these efforts throughout.
“This year [in 2006], through the RTP Center for Advanced Studies, IBM provided over $1M in grants and hardware to support local universities. including the recent NCCU SUR award. These IBM programs will continue to support the Virtual Computing Initiative next year – and some of that funding will go to establish open source software development projects using Eclipse. As an example, the NC universities have a tremendous wealth of talent in performance/availability modeling and optimization – and through the use of open source projects, we can channel that incredible talent to serve the needs of the builders and users of this shared cluster,” said Dr. Andy Rindos, head of IBM RTP CAS.
The Friday Institute: Adapting VCL for K-12
With the VCL model, educators can bring their labs and advanced information technology solutions – with all of their educational resources and content – out to where their students are, without having to place expensive-to-maintain IT resources at each school site. The most complex IT infrastructure can remain remote at a university or central administration facility that has all of the skills and resources required to maintain it. All a student or a teacher needs is an inexpensive workstation (or a laptop or a “thin-client”) and Internet connectivity to be able to access the most advanced educational material and services.
The William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, within the NCSU College of Education, recognize the implications of the VCL model for K-12 education. While the computing power needs required by elementary, middle and high school students and educators are typically far less than those of university users, those institutions still need the benefit of the best educational information technologies to assure sound foundations and competitiveness for our workforce of the future. Therefore, in many situations mapping virtualized servers and applications onto VCL resources perfectly addresses the K-12 cost point. And since the servers can be located and maintained outside a given school district, and even shared amongst multiple school districts, the solution can be delivered efficiently and effectively to students in even the most remote counties or the ones with the most limited resources.
Friday Institute faculty and IT administrators are currently working with several rural northeast NC school districts to demonstrate the power of the VCL model in serving their needs, including Granville, Franklin, Halifax, and Northampton counties. Through the help of an IBM grant, they are also developing educational applications and course-ware that are uniquely suited for delivery via the NCSU VCL cluster.