Duke Picks Elluminate Live! as Distance Learning Platform

After what it called a significant competitive analysis, Duke University picked Elluminate Live!, a platform for distance education and academic collaboration, to enhance the online experience of its remote students. The university said it wanted a broad feature set, cross-platform support, participant control for classroom and session management, universal accessibility, security, and architecture tailored to enterprise-wide integration.

Ben Rogers, project manager in Duke’s Digital Media Solutions group, said the school wanted “a single solution that would best meet the needs of the entire Duke community, providing functionality for distance education, opportunities for collaboration, and support for outreach activities.” Added Tim P'e, senior manager of Digital Media Solutions: “It’s an ever-evolving world of digital media. So what’s important to us is not just what a product d'es now, but what it will be capable of in the future.”

The Elluminate Live! platform features voice over Internet, interactive functionality for participants and moderators, and what it calls a “No User Left Behind” capability, covering any user regardless of their platform or Internet connection speed...

For more information, click here.

Stanford Seeks Best High Performance Computing Pieces

Stanford University selected a Cisco 7008 Infiniband Server Fabric Switch as the inter-switching price-performance leader for its High Performance Computing Center. The Center sought to pick best of breed components for various functional pieces of the high performance computing process.

“The goal was to evaluate and choose the best price-performance options for each key cluster component and establish a reproducible best practice for rapid deployment,” said Steve Jones, founder of the HPCC and HPC manager for flow physics and computational engineering. “We were looking for an interconnect based on InfiniBand technology, but it wasn’t just about finding the best hardware component. We wanted a complete solution including the message-passing layer – a solid hardware and software combination.”

The Cisco switches deliver 20 and 10 gigabits-per-second bandwidth per port, respectively. The Cisco solution also integrates easily into the open, standards-based compute environment of the HPCC, which includes Linux-based servers and Rocks cluster management software.

“By finding an optimal combination of foundational cluster technologies, we’ve been able to refine the art of cluster deployment and operation,” added Jones...

For more information, click here.