Selected TechNotes – March 2005

Grid computing becomes useful in industry
A computer assisted design job that was taking three months to be completed, is now said to be done over night. This is thanks to grid computing power provided by the IBM grid computing system. Landrover is now able to use the power of hundreds of PCs spread around the company to carry out the testing of designs. The system is able to allocate work to groups of PCs and have the results by morning.

At the other end of “reality” is the “IBM Blue Gene/L”, a super computer that has now set a standard of 135.5 teraflops – that’s over 135 trillion calculations per second! or a “135 thousand million” calculations per second. This was achieved by linking up some 32,768 IBM power processors. The next step, they say is to move this up to double this number, that’s well over 65,000 power processors, which should be able to push processing power to 270 teraflops (or a thousand million calculations per second). If you need this kind of processing power, but cannot afford the millions of dollars needed to buy and run it, IBM is now renting out access to one of its own machines. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/emergingtech/0,39020357,39192667,00.htm

Time for PDAs to give way in the business sector
With Sony announcing it’s withdrawal from the PDA market and more and more multipurpose cell phones offering PDA features, the time for businesses to drop PDAs is rapidly approaching. PDAs have now moved into the “space” occupied by digital music players, book readers and games. Cell phones have moved from being machines that carry voices, to messaging devices (the better cellular networks communicate across over 160 countries now) and are now adding synchronized calendars, tasks, and contacts to its range of functions. Those with higher quality screens can be used to read documents and even play games. Whereas some communication systems using GPRS cellular networks (so called 2.5G) are likely to cost you $1 to $3 per message coming in or going out (depending on length) and are limited to just over 60 countries world-wide, the short messaging system that has been in use since just after the release of GSM phones still only cost a few cents per message and move freely between over 160 countries. Sometimes older technology just makes sense.

An emerging technology in the cellular space that needs watching is called “3G”. This will replace a range of names such as “GPRS” and “EDGE”. It is being rolled out in countries in Europe, Africa and Asia and reduces the cost of emails and data sent over the cellular network from around $8 per Meg to about 10c per Meg. Your choice of what to buy into will depend largely on where you live and where you travel. The more countries you visit, and expect to be in contact, the more basic you need to keep your technology – the short message system of GSM phones is the most cost effective and ubiquitous, as mentioned above – if your correspondents all use cell phones. If you are planning to move around a small piece of the world where 3G has been implemented, this is the way to go – and provided your correspondents all use cell phones or email. There is a link to useful information on the card you can use in your notebook PC to connect to the Internet. If you get one of these in your country, check very carefully on the prices you will be paying, especially on international roaming. If the service defaults to GPRS when traveling internationally, you may be paying as much as USD40 per Meg (read: “incredibly expensive”)! http://www.vodacom.co.za/packages/3g/overview.aspx

COL Launches a Learning Object Repository Released as Free Open Source Software
COL has launched an online database of learning content that provides software to Commonwealth countries free of charge. Institutions or governments can establish a shared repository by accessing free open source software from COL’s Learning Object Repository (LOR).

A number of online databases of learning content – or Learning Object Repositories - have been created around the world including CAREO, MERLOT and EdNA. COL has worked with eduSource and CANARIE (a not-for-profit corporation for advanced Internet development supported by its members, project partners and the Canadian Government) to develop the necessary tools, standards and protocols. The partners invested more than CDN $8 million in this venture. The software produced by this consortium has been made available in COL’s Learning Object Repository under a free open source software license.

Vancouver-based 3waynet Inc. developed complementary open source software that, when used together, could provide a fully functioning repository. In co-operation with COL, 3waynet created all the programming “connective tissue” to make these systems work together and provide an easy-to-use webpage to access content.

The system includes the ability to add information about the learning material (“learning objects”) with “meta tags”. These are IMS-compatible (IMS Schema 1.2.2) and the system is able to “federate-search” other repositories when the user is looking for learning materials. Installed on a local or shared server, this will enable course developers to locate learning materials along with the necessary copyright information from multiple continents.

COL is hosting the software and is collaborating with the African Virtual University, headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, that will upload and make available open source courseware that Commonwealth countries can access free of charge. COL anticipates partnering with other groups as awareness of the LOR grows. More information on the LOR is available at: www.col.org/lor

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