CSC News

November 30, 2007

Intel & IBM Equipment Gifts to Aid VCL Expansion

On Wednesday, November 28th, 2007, NC State University announced a $2.4M equipment gift from Intel Corporation and a $1.2M equipment gift from IBM, which will support the expansion of its open source Virtual Computing Lab (VCL), a powerful next-generation computing environment with the potential to radically change the educational and research landscape.

The VCL, part of an effort to bring affordable computing resources to K-12 schools, community colleges and universities, as well as high-performance resources to university researchers, allows students and researchers to access powerful computing software and hardware remotely. Students and teachers across the state will be able to log in to a central computer located hundreds of miles away and access state-of-the-art computing software.

The Intel and IBM donations will soon be supplemented by a NetApp donation, that along with NC State University, UNC System, and North Carolina Community College System investments, will provide the computational cloud services (out of MCNC) to a number of North Carolina K-12 schools, community colleges and UNC campuses.

In addition, NC State is working with the UNC General Administration, NC educational community and a number of universities and institutions in other states and abroad to instantiate virtual computing environments using its open-source VCL software.

For more information on the Virtual Computing Lab go to http://vcl.ncsu.edu/.

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