North Carolina State University and IBM Help Bridge Digital Divide in North Carolina, and Beyond

North Carolina State University and IBM Help Bridge Digital Divide in North Carolina, and Beyond

North Carolina State University (NC State) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that the Virtual Computing Initiative (VCI) is making tools and resources available to students at all educational levels to build 21st century skills. Launched seven months ago, the VCI is delivering on its promise to promote the universal access of technology to deliver traditional education in a more powerful and impactful way across the State.

With this announcement, the VCI is meeting its goal set out in October, 2006, to create and build a community of users, researchers and educators who will adopt, utilize and support the Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) paradigm. The VCL is an open architecture developed by the NC State Information Technology Division, the College of Engineering, the Friday Institute and IBM Corporation. This open infrastructure has already helped over 30,000 students and faculty to easily use and share resources to support everyday educational and research requirements in a more productive and cost effective way.

This year alone, the VCL has been tapped to support a half dozen new computing solutions that range from K-12 learning programs, to advanced university-level teaching and research applications, to high-performance computing. The VCL is also supporting new pilot programs at several regional universities, community colleges and K-12 schools.

In addition to the large scale production NC State VCL, new pilots have either been established or will soon be online at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), North Carolina Central University (NCCU), Duke University, UNC-Greensboro (UNC-G), East Carolina University (ECU), Western Carolina University and Appalachian State University (ASU). NC Agricultural & Technical University (NC A&T), Wake Forest University and Elizabeth City State University are also interested in establishing pilots. The NC State VCL is also supporting Engineering Online and 2+2 programs at Lenoir Community College, Craven County Community College, UNC-Wilmington and UNC-Asheville.

Read the complete Press Release