The Virtual Computing Lab featured in May ’08 Chronicle of Higher Education.
“A Computer Lab That Students Use but Never See”
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
An excerpt of the article
North Carolina State University may never build another computer lab.
Instead the university has installed racks of equipment in windowless rooms where students and professors never go.
The project is called the Virtual Computing Lab, and users enter it remotely, from their own computers in dormitory rooms or libraries. They get all the features they’ve had in the past, including access to expensive software packages, like 3-D modeling tools and advanced statistical programs, that they need for courses. But now the programs run on powerful computer servers behind the scenes, instead of on desktop PC’s. And this lab never closes.