Singapore school promotes cloud education

Singapore Polytechnic (SP) has introduced the Singapore Polytechnic Electrical and Electronic Engineering Cloud Computing Center (SPE³C³) that will deliver modern cloud computing education and training in an operational data center environment. SP has worked with Cisco Systems Inc., Citrix Systems Inc. and NetApp Inc. to offer educational technologies for sophisticated projects and research tasks.

Conceptualized by SP's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the SPE³C³ will provide teaching staff and students with on-demand, scalable, virtual computing and storage in labs. SP aims to promote the benefits of cloud computing to realize cost savings, energy efficiency and dynamic scalability. While the resources will initially be available to the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering students anywhere on campus, it will be made accessible inside and outside of campus in the future as long as they have Internet access.

"The new SPE³C³ shows SP's commitment to innovation in education and the use of cutting edge technology to provide students with relevant and up-to-date training to develop their skills in virtualization, enterprise and cloud computing. SP graduates will be truly work-ready in the cloud era and be able to contribute immediately to the industry upon graduation," stated Tan Hang Cheong, principal, SP.

In the new academic year starting April 2012, students in the third year of the Diploma in Computer Engineering course at SP's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering can look forward to two brand new elective modules—Data Center Management and System Virtualization. These courses are designed to educate and train students to setup, manage and support data centers, virtualization techniques (including server, storage and network virtualization) and data recovery.

Singapore pushes for engineering education advancement Singapore's Institute of Technical Education (ITE) and Cisco are also partnering to develop relevant curriculum and joint certifications to bridge the skills gap of engineering graduates entering the workforce. Learn more about the ITE-Cisco Collaboration Technologies Centre here.

Innovative cloud computing education
SPE³C³ is built on integrated cloud architecture from Cisco, Citrix Systems and NetApp. It is specially configured to support up to 31,000 Input/Output Operations per Second, touted as the first for the education industry in the country. In another industry first, the SPE³C³ can power up to 400 virtual machines, and more importantly in relation to class duration, it can startup and shut-down 240 server virtual machines in six minutes, 20 times faster than the standard industry benchmark, claimed SP.

"Our main requirement for the new data center is its ability to support the simultaneous startup and shut-down of a large number of computers in a short time. In our environment, this happens at least five to six times in a day, at the start and end of each class. We worked very closely with Citrix, as well as Cisco and NetApp, to architect a solution that will achieve this for us," noted Steven Chew Lai Keat, senior lecturer from SP.