"Rent or buy?" is a question people ask about everything from housing to textbooks. It is also a question universities must consider when it comes to high-performance computing (HPC). With the advent of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Windows HPC Server, Rackspace's OpenStack, and other cloud-based services, researchers now have…

Paying for employee turnover costs, data storage, and multiple layers of benefits can be difficult for fiscally constrained institutions, especially as budget cuts and finance-limiting legislation abound in school districts across the country. Many traditional paper-based systems have been replaced with automated, software-based services, helping…

This paper presents a practitioner's view on student system implementations in the Australian university sector. A student information system is a core system of any university and integral to its operations and services to students. These systems are constantly on the list of major projects and at any point in time, a university is either…

Most UK universities can trace their current management information systems back to significant investments made in the 1990s, largely fuelled by concerns about the millenium bug and a change from character interfaces to graphical user interfaces following the introduction of the personal computer. It was during this period that institutions also…

Uninterrupted, high-bandwidth network connectivity is crucial for higher education. Colleges and universities increasingly adopt gigabit wireless solutions because of their fiber-equivalent performance, quick implementation, and significant return on investment. For just those reasons, Rush University Medical Center switched from free space optics…

Consolidations come in all shapes and sizes, including mergers, annexations and dissolutions. They do not all take place under state mandate, however. A handful of districts consolidate every year in some states like Illinois that have large numbers of small districts, many of them dual districts that serve K-8 or 9-12 in the same geographic area.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the use of a non-expensive dynamic computing resource, consisting of a Beowulf class cluster and a NoW, as an educational and research infrastructure. Design/methodology/approach: Clusters, built using commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware components and free, or commonly used, software, provide…