Case Study - Scientific Application Streaming at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

priya.m.abani@intel.com — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:44:18 GMT

Hi all,

Intel has been working with various companies on implementing the concept of Dynamic Virtual Clients. As innovators among Harvard University’s IT community, the School of Engineering and Applies Sciences (SEAS) is an ideal environment for implementation of Application Streaming technology. Within SEAS, the office of Computing and Information Technology’s (CIT) CyberInfrastructure Labs (CI Labs) supports faculty, researchers, students, and staff by deploying and maintaining up-to-date, effective computing technologies.

With application streaming, applications are streamed on demand from the data center to the client, where they are executed locally. The goal of the scientific application streaming project, as outlined in the attached white paper, is to simplify the deployment of large, complex engineering and scientific applications to a highly diverse user population of around 1,000 students and faculty.

Initial results show install times decreasing from hours to minutes, as well as fewer problems caused by human error during complex installation and licensing procedures. As innovators among Harvard’s IT community, the CI Labs anticipates wider implementation of application streaming, both within its user base and across Harvard.

Check out the details in the attached case study.

Demo of SCCM R2 w/App-V from Microsoft World Partner Conference

jason.a.davidson@intel.com — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:23:18 GMT

The 2008 Microsoft World Partner Conference (WPC) was hosted in Houston, TX on July7-10, 2008, with global participation. The WPC provides an online and in-person forum to learn more about business growth opportunities and product innovation from Microsoft executives.

This year the ECMF team participated at the event and provide a showcase that incorporated the manageability of Intel vPro in a real world scenario that utilized application virtualization and steaming. For the showcase the team used SCCM SP1 R2 beta as an enterprise management console with Microsoft's App-V (Soft grid 4.5 beta) to stream and manage applications to the vPro clients.

This provides the ability to:

Dynamically deliver application on the world's most manageable clients
Enable greater business agility with an enhanced end-user experience
Achieve IT "Green Computing" and reduced TCO objectives via fine-grained update controls.

After the event, I sat down with Craig Pierce to record the demonstration. I think it is a very compelling 4 minutes of video. In the demo he shows both the server console and the client experience, and launches 2 versions of Microsoft Word (2007 & 2003), which share drivers and normally wouldn't be able to run on the same machine. This concept can be extended to many other applications.

Application Virtualization and streaming allows you to no longer go through the entire install process, but simply stream and execute the applications you need when you need them - and the licenses for these applications can then be reclaimed when your not using them. This should become a defacto standard over time, as it works well in all compute models (from the rich client models to thin clients).

Questions? Comments? Funny remarks?

-Jason A. Davidson

p.s. Thank you to Chris Kaneshiro, Sophia Stalliviere, Nicole Trent, and Gunitika Dandona for your help in filming & editing this video.