What is it?

The Virtual Computing Initiative (VCI) represents an academic community project (involving universities, colleges and K-12) that is being adopted at educational institutions inside and outside the US. Originally launched by IBM and North Carolina State University at the end of 2006, it is currently being sponsored world wide by Blade.org (together with other academic and industry partners). The goal of the initiative is to improve the quality of education through the application of technologies that include virtualization, cloud computing, hosted client-server models etc. - all exemplified by the NC State Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) paradigm.

The initiative seeks to create a community of educators and researchers to

• establish Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) pilots in support of their education and research; and
• pursue research into the VCL infrastructure itself and to develop VCL images and applications that can be shared within the community.

How to participate:

To learn more about the Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) itself, please visit vcl.ncsu.edu. Several VCL tutorials and papers can be downloaded here. If you would like to have a first hand experience with VCL and don't have an account, you can sign up for a temporary account here.

NC State has made the code for its VCL technology freely available through the Apache open source community. You can participate and track its progress here.

If you would like to install the VCL Virtual Machine Appliance on your own blade server, installation instructions can be found at ibiblio.org.

Please note that any IBM software can be freely used by educators for use in the classroom or in research through the IBM Academic Initiative. Membership is free.

Latest Press Release

"North Carolina State University and IBM Extend Access to Educational Resources to the World through Cloud Computing"

Raleigh, NC, October 24, 2008.

North Carolina State University (NC State) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans to provide every student in North Carolina access to advanced educational resources through NC State's Virtual Computing Lab (VCL), a cloud computing-based technology. Through this cloud - which is a set of Internet-based resources - students at K-12 schools, colleges around the state and the University of North Carolina system campuses themselves will have access to the most advanced educational materials, select software applications and computing and storage resources.

NC State also announced that the code for its VCL technology is available through the Apache open source community for free, and is in discussions with a number of universities across the globe that wish to replicate this cloud computing model.

In support of this effort, the NC State Department of Computer Science and Office of Information Technology announced the creation of a Center of Excellence in Cloud Computing, an applied research and development facility on the NC State campus that that will spearhead collaboration projects between NC State and the IBM "Blue Cloud" development team, helping improve the quality of education provided through the VCL platform and ensure reliability. Continued >>>