One Laptop Per Child Group Expands its Audience

There has been speculation that OLAP may offer a two for one program. The speculation is over.

U.S. and Canadian residents can pay $400 for one laptop to keep and one to give to a child in a developing nation.

From: Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
Monday, September 24, 2007 4:00 AM PDT

Some of the low-cost PCs designed by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for kids in the developing world will go to people in North America.

That's the result of a program the group plans to launch on Monday that will let U.S. and Canadian residents pay US$400 for one laptop to keep and one to give to a child in a developing nation.

Initially, at least, purchasers won't be able to choose where the second laptop will go.

"The idea is to help feed programs in the least developed countries and broaden the community of engagement," said Walter Bender, president of software and content for OLPC. By putting the laptops in the hands of people in North America, the group hopes to persuade more people to contribute content or other developments to the project, he said.

The offer will start on Nov. 12 and run through Nov. 26. "We don't want to divert too much away from the developing world, so we'll do a short window," Bender said.

Mass production of the laptops is scheduled for October, with the first units landing in the hands of kids around the world in early November, he said. The initial run will generate 40,000 units and production will quickly double and triple that capacity to meet demand, he said.

The original plan for the OLPC project was to create a laptop that would cost less than $100, but more recently the price has been pegged closer to $190. The $400 deal for two laptops includes some padding for the cost of sending one of the laptops to a remote location, Bender said.

Can we load "rdesktop" into the system and Skype too?

Until the next post:

Steve

NComputing's Breakthrough Virtual PC Technology Enables 180,000 Low-Cost Workstations on Classroom Desktops Nationwide

From Marketwire:

Sep 17, 2007 04:00 ET

Macedonia Becomes First Nation to Provide Computer Workstations for Every Student

NComputing's Breakthrough Virtual PC Technology Enables 180,000 Low-Cost Workstations on Classroom Desktops Nationwide

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwire - September 17, 2007) - NComputing, provider of the world's most affordable solutions for PC access, today announced that its multi-user virtual desktop software and low-cost virtual PC terminals will be used to equip every school child in the Republic of Macedonia with a rich individual computer experience. The most ambitious national undertaking ever to standardize all schools around a single technology platform, the "Computer for Every Child" project of the Macedonia Ministry of Education and Science will deploy 180,000 NComputing-enabled workstation seats, enough to provide virtually every elementary and secondary school student in the nation with his or her own classroom computing device.

NComputing's multi-user virtual desktop software and low-cost virtual PC terminals, along with supporting Linux-based PCs, were proven in Macedonia tests to deliver a rich PC experience at less than half the cost of any other proposed solution, including low-cost desktop and laptop PCs and other thin client options, according to Ivo Ivanovski, Macedonia's Minister for the Information Society. Huge additional advantages in reduced maintenance and replacement costs made the choice of NComputing even more compelling. With half the students attending school in the morning, and half attending in the afternoon, 180,000 workstations will provide a 1-to-1 computing experience -- one virtual PC at each student's desk -- for the country's entire public school student population.

"The Computer for Every Child initiative is the largest and most important education project undertaken in the 15-year history of the Republic of Macedonia," according to Ivanovsky. "Our goal is to build a knowledge-based economy in which our entire workforce is educated in using information and communication technology within the next five years. Yet, like most school systems around the world, Macedonia's education system has limited financial and infrastructural resources to address this challenge. By adopting NComputing's low-cost virtual PC technology, Macedonia is taking the lead in providing computer-based education for school children."

"We at NComputing believe that providing PC access to the next billion users -- those who cannot afford the cost of an individual PC -- is the single biggest challenge facing our industry today. Perhaps the most important segment of this under-served mass market is school children, including students in the United States and other developed countries, as well as those in developing nations," said Stephen Dukker, Chairman and CEO of NComputing. "We're gratified that NComputing's technology can be an important part of the solution in Macedonia and around the world."

NComputing's corporate mission is to provide affordable PC access to under-resourced markets around the world, including schools and users in developing and developed countries. The company's revolutionary technology allows a single PC to be shared by multiple simultaneous users -- each running their own applications. Setup is simple, and begins with software on the shared PC that creates multiple virtual user desktops. Standard monitors, keyboards and mice then plug into very low-cost, highly reliable virtual PCs (also known as access terminals). As a major leap forward in green computing, NComputing solutions draw between one and five watts of power for each added user, versus 115 for a typical PC. Neither IT staff nor end users require special training, and the system is compatible with Windows, Linux and standard PC applications. Pricing is as low as $70 per seat.

With NComputing's X300, up to seven users can simultaneously share a single PC. The cost and power savings are critical in school deployments, including in Macedonia, because budgets and electricity are often limited. Macedonia also chose NComputing's technology because maintenance and replacement costs are a fraction of what they are for traditional PC deployments. NComputing's solid-state virtual PC terminals have no moving parts and require little or no maintenance, so the principal maintenance costs follow only the shared PCs and monitors. In addition, in an upgrade cycle to newer PCs, only the PCs themselves, not the virtual PC terminals, need to be replaced.

Through a global network of resellers, NComputing also offers the L-series, which connects via Ethernet at any distance from a shared PC or server on either Local Area Networks or over the Internet. The number of L-series virtual PCs supported is limited only by the power of the shared PC. Hundreds can be supported on virtualized servers.

When completed, Macedonia's Computer for Every Child initiative will have deployed approximately 160,000 NComputing virtual PC terminals and 20,000 NComputing-enabled PCs (which each also support a student on the attached monitor) running the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. The Haier Company, a diversified manufacturer and PC maker, and one of China's largest and most respected companies, won the contract for procurement and installation. The project will enable a range of innovative educational programs, including interactive web-based classes in which specialized experts teach lessons in such areas as mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics to multiple schools and classrooms around the country.

NComputing's multi-user system software and low-cost virtual PC terminals represent the next generation of thin computing, in which multi-user computing finally becomes affordable and accessible, and the user-experience equals that of a dedicated PC. The Macedonia project is at the same time, the largest known thin client and desktop Linux deployment ever undertaken.

"This project would not have been possible 5 years ago," said Ivanovski. "Today's least expensive desktop PCs are so powerful we use less than 10% of their capacity and NComputing's technology puts this wasted power to work."

In a brief 18 months after starting active shipments, NComputing has sold more than 500,000 seats, including more than 200,000 to U.S. schools, providing technology that addresses the needs of under-served markets worldwide, as well as those of small business and enterprise customers. The company's technology is being sold and deployed in more than 80 countries -- including thousands of schools, corporate and small business offices, and villages and cities in Africa, Europe, Asia and South America.

Until the next post,

Steve

26.25 gigaflops Server for less than 2,500 USD and fits into a suit case

From:Calvin College
3201 Burton Street, SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49546

Written by Allison Graff, web communications coordinator

Student, prof build budget supercomputer
August 30 , 2007

When Tim Brom, Class 07, (pictured right) set out to build a budget supercomputer with Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams, he didn’t know the product of his efforts might end up in his checked baggage headed for England.

Brom, now a graduate student at the University of Kentucky continuing his studies in computer science, worked with Adams to build Microwulf, a machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet.

“It’s small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk,” said Brom.

This may prove useful next summer when Brom and others from his graduate program travel to England to do work that will require “a significant amount of computing power.” And as the price of commercial supercomputers is often prohibitive for many educational institutions, bringing a “personal” supercomputer like Microwulf could be a cost-effective solution for the group of graduate researchers.

“So far as we can tell, this is the first supercomputer to have this low price/performance ratio—the first to cost less than $100/Gflop,” said Adams.

This is a significant achievement considering that Microwulf is more than twice as fast as Deep Blue, the IBM-created supercomputer that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and cost only a fraction of the $5 million spent to build Deep Blue.

Microwulf has been measured to process 26.25 gigaflops, or 26.25 billion double-precision floating point instructions, per second. It achieves this performance by relying on four dual-core motherboards connected by an 8-port Gigabyt Ethernet switch. The connected components form a three-tiered system that looks like a triple-decker sandwich.


Supercomputers like Microwulf are used to solve problems that take too much number-crunching for an ordinary desktop to handle, either because its processor is too slow, or because it doesn’t have enough memory, said Adams. Truly huge supercomputers (more than 100 times as fast as Microwulf) are used by organizations like the National Weather Service to process meteorological data and by the United States Missile Defense Agency to simulate nuclear tests.

Microwulf is considered a Beowulf cluster, a group of networked computers that run open source software and work in parallel to solve a single problem. Beowulf clusters are so named because their homemade, cost-effective nature liberates researchers from expensive commercial options for super-computing, much like Beowulf of the Old English poem liberated the Danes from the tyrannical rule of Grendel.

Do Brom and Adams see themselves as “liberators” by unveiling of a system like Microwulf?

“We’re taking the liberation a step further,” said Adams. “Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own.”

Just two years ago, building a personal supercomputer like Microwulf for the price of a high-performance desktop was out of the realm of possibility for Adams and Brom. But when they saw a portable Beowulf cluster called Little Fe at a conference in October 2005, they began to think about building their system.

“I was really enjoying my high-performance computing class and wanted to keep working in that area after the class ended. I was also thinking about graduate school at the time and a project like Microwulf looks good on a curriculum vitae,” said Brom.

So by the summer of 2006 when the price of hardware materials needed to build Microwulf had gone down, Adams asked his academic department to provide $2500 for the project. He also asked Brom, then beginning his last year at Calvin, to help him build the supercomputer. In January of 2007, they began to piece together their system and by March, they were running tests to see just what Microwulf could do. In the end, the project came in under budget with Microwulf donning a price-tag of just $2470. With current hardware prices, another system like Microwulf would cost half of what it cost Adams and Brom to build earlier this year.

Though supercomputers are typically evaluated on their price/performance ratio, Adams built Microwulf giving attention to its power/performance ratio as well. In other words, he wanted to pay attention to the system’s energy consumption.

“This is becoming increasingly important, as excess power consumption is inefficient and generates waste heat, which can in turn decrease reliability,” said Adams on his Web site.

Adams and Brom managed to build Microwulf so that it could plug into one standard 120V wall outlet. This feature only enhances the system’s portability, allowing it to be taken to classrooms and other research labs where large power supplies are unavailable.

Adams isn’t going to let Microwulf gather dust in the supercomputing lab in the Science Building. Instead he’s going to take it out on the road, mostly to middle school and high school classrooms to try and get teenagers hooked on computer science.

Microwulf’s inventors aren’t set on keeping their blueprints for the supercomputer a secret. In fact, they’ve just published a detailed description and evaluation of their project on Cluster Monkey so others can build their own portable and affordable supercomputers.

It remains to be seen whether Brom will be able to get his wire-filled personal supercomputer past airport security next summer.

Until the next post,

Steve