The Final Progress Report - The Smart Computer Laboratory

Transcription

1 The Final Progress Report - The Smart Computer Laboratory Introduction: This project delivered a low cost computer laboratory to primary school kids at the Dharmashoka college, Ambalangoda in Sri Lanka. The photos are included in the Appendix-I and videos are uploaded to Youtube (see Appendix-I). During the project period, Ubuntu operating system was customized to support multiple dummy terminal. School teachers and school kids were trained to use the terminals. A research paper which describes our outcomes and achievements were published at the 26 th National IT conference in Sri Lanka. The final research paper is included in the appendix-ii. The following table summarizes achievement of this project. Summary: Activity Status Comment Furniture A/C installation and installation of power cables Assembling and testing the machines Done Done Done Customizing the software Done It can be download from web site. After visit the above site, please follow Research-> Linux MultiseatEnvirment link. Deploying at the pilot site Deployed 20 terminals 20 terminal units were deployed using 5 terminal servers. The other 5 terminal servers were assembled. At present we are raising the funding to purchase next 20 LCD monitors. Analyzing the performance Done The system was tested with real users. Training the school teachers Done Five (5) teachers and twenty (20) students were trained. They conduct the regular computer training classes to the other students. Publishing a research paper Done A research paper was published at 26 th National IT conference in Sri Lanka.

2 Lessons learned & Disappointments: Our terminal server design requires computer mother boards with four(4) PCI slots and PCI VGA cards. By the time we initiate the project required hardware were available in the local market. However, when we placed the order, these hardware were out of stock and and we had to order 10 new video cards from the Internet. This increased the cost of a terminal. Changes: Instead of the regular monitors, we decided to install new LCD monitors due to the following reasons.! Power consumption of the LCD monitors are very low! LCD monitors may not create any eye problems! We can get more space in the laboratory. We have budgeted Rs /= for 40 monitors in our proposal but 40 LCD monitors require Rs /=. At present 20 LCD monitors purchased at cost of Rs /= using the additional financial support provided by the old boy association. We are still in the process of finding the rest of the money for next 20 LCD monitors. Additional Information: The project goals were successfully archived and now schools kids are using the laboratory (see Appendix-1).

3 Appendix I : Photos Deploying the Terminal Laboratory (See a video at you tube: Conducting the training workshop on 12 th November 2008 (See video at you tube: School kids are using the laboratory now

4 Appendix II: Research Paper Pokuru PC: A Low Cost Multi-Terminal Girisha Durrel De Silva, N.M.Laxaman, Kasun De Zoysa, Chamath Keppitiyagama University of Colombo School of Computing girisha@girisha.net, [nml,kasun,chamath]@ucsc.cmb.ac.lk, ABSTRACT Even though computer prices are coming down everyday, still a fully fledged computer laboratory is a luxury for schools in third word countries. Thus coming up with a solution where more than one person could use a single PC can reduce the burden by a considerable amount. Cost effectiveness of the multi terminal was considered as the main objective of this work. However, this objective must be balanced with the quality of the user experience. We also investigated the the terminal usability and efficiency when the number of users increases and also the behavior of the terminal when different types of applications were being used. These investigations yielded acceptable results. Because a single PC is used by many users simultaneously we call it as "Pokuru Personal Computer (PPC)". Our performance tests show that PPC utilizes the CPU and memory to its maximum potential and the solution is ideal for a computer laboratory. 1.0 INTRODUCTION With the advancement of processor technology, processors in the modern age have become more efficient as well as more powerful in every aspect. Going in to more detail multi processing capabilities have been one of the advancements in many processor designs and most of the processors in the modern age are capable of handling multi processing effectively and efficiently. If thats where the processors stand out right now mother boards and RAM chips should be up to the standards of the processors. Thus PC's in the modern age are more powerful and efficient than we can imagine. Thus with these high performance PCs and their multi processing capabilities we came up with the idea that they could not only be used for high performance computing but also they can be used to create computers which could consists of a mechanism to incorporate many users simultaneously. To come up with such a suggestion the main reason was that most of the PCs contain high amount of processing power and that processing power is not utilized for its fullest potential frequently enough by most of the common applications that people run on their computers. Specially school going children very rarely use applications that need high processing power and that would imply that most of the time the processor is idle. Thus with such an amount of processing power loss could be a real waste. Therefore if we could come up with an innovative solution call Pokuru PC (PPC) that

5 could make use of the idle processing power, we could use today's powerful processors to their fullest potential. The whole idea behind our PPC comes up with an effort to use the idle processing power such that it could be utilized to its fullest potential. As mentioned above most of the processors are designed with multi processing capabilities and that design feature is also used to its fullest potential in the PPC. 2.0 Introduction to the PPC and existing multi terminal technologies A multi terminal is a computer that consists of one systems unit and the users use the systems unit as they use a normal stand alone PC. Each user has his/her own Monitor, Key board and mouse. When the PC boots up each user can log into the booted up operating system with his/her own user account and continue to work on the same PC just as using a normal PC. For an example lets take a multi terminal that could incorporate four users at once. Therefore a configured multi terminal consist of the following equipment P" One Systems Unit which includes " One mother board " A processor " One or more hard disks 8" Four Key boards H" Four Mouse " Finally four monitors Coming into software terms in the multi terminal, we have come up with a remastered Ubuntu Linux distribution which could configure it self automatically as a multi terminal depending upon the hardware devices attached to the systems unit. As mentioned in the introduction, our PPC is a multi terminal solution where we could incorporate many users at once in one systems unit. In turn it is important to mention that we have created such a solution with out using networking technologies and that the users doesn't connect in to the systems unit using networks. Another important fact to be considered is that all the terminals, the users will be using are dummy terminals. The name dummy terminals comes as these terminals do not contain any processing power. But if we take into account thin clients, thin clients contain processing power within them self. In out multi terminal each dummy terminals processing will be done at the systems unit. Some of the popular multi terminal technologies existing right now can be listed as follows[1]. " Multiterminal with Xephyr P" Multiterminal with evdev " Multiterminal with faketty " Multiterminal with Xnest

6 In addition to the multi terminal solutions, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project provides laptop for children for around Rs. 20,000/=. However, laptops are not so durable and they are pron to error. As describe in the section 5, our solution provides a personal computer which less than the price of OLPC [2]. A multi terminal that contains two dummy terminals is shown in figure [1]. 3.0 Hardware Design When it came to the hardware design of the PPC, we connected one VGA card to the AGP/PCI Express slot and connect the rest of the VGA cards to the PCI's slots in the motherboard. When it came to the key boards and mouse, one key board and mouse was connected to the PS/2 ports and rest of the key boards and mouse were connected to the USB ports. This is the whole procedure of connecting the hardware to the systems unit. It is important to mention that we didn't use any kind of special hardware. If by any chance the systems unit contains less amount of USB ports we could always come up with a USB hub. A Systems unit where one AGP Video card and a PCI Video card connected is shown in figure [2]. 4.0 Implementation Details PPC system configuration occurs automatically by the use of a script that we have created. The following details mentioned below will contain the configurations that the script will automatically configure. First and foremost we need to find out the number of VGA cards connected to the system. After words the bus address of all the VGA cards are taken into account. We could very easily find out the VGA cards physical address by using the following shell command, $ lspci grep -i VGA Thereafter we need to find the physical addresses of all the key boards and mouse connected to the systems unit. These address are also placed in a file, and by accessing the file we could find the address. $ vim /proc/bus/input/devices The next step in the configuration is to configure the Xserver [3]. Xserver is an technology used in most of the Linux operating systems to configure displays. We create different server layouts in the Xserver configuration depending on the amount of terminals we need and for each server layout we assign a different key board mouse and a VGA card. These VGA cards key boards and mouse are differentiated from each other from the physical address we found out in the previous steps in the configuration. The Xserver configuration file is placed at /etc/x11/xorg.conf. Final step in the configuration is to configure the GDM file [4]. By editing the GDM file we could create different Xserver sessions containing the server layout configurations we configured in the Xserver configuration file. Each Xserver session created will be one terminal. Thus users can log in differently to each

7 Xserver session from their dummy terminal. The GDM configuration file is placed at /etc/gdm/gdm.conf. The important thing to mention in the above configuration procedure is that in our research we were able to come up with a script that does all the above steps automatically and configure the multi terminal. Our script is capable of configuring any amounts of hardware plugged in and it could also return to a state where the PC is used as a single machine. 5.0 Cost benefit analysis For the cost benefit analysis lets use a multi terminal configured to use four users. In other words a PPC with four terminals. If brand new parts are used for the multi terminal # A systems unit with the following configuration would cost around Rs. 30,000/= Intel P4 with HT Technologies 1GB DDRII RAM 256MB VGA (PCI EXPRESS) And other necessary components # Four 15'' inch LCD Monitors would cost around Rs. 80,000/=(4x20,000/=) # Three VGA (PCI) cards would cost Rs. 6,000/= (3x2,000/=) # Four key boards and four mouse would cost Rs. 4,000/= Thus all together the whole multi system would cost 120,000.00/=. If second hand computer parts are used for the multi terminal 1. A systems unit with the following configuration would cost around Rs. 20,000/= Intel P4 with HT Technologies 1GB DDRII RAM 256MB VGA (PCI EXPRESS) And other necessary components 2. Four 15'' inch flat monitors would cost around Rs. 12,000/=(4x3,000/=) 3. Three VGA (PCI) cards would cost Rs. 6,000/= (3x2,000/=) [Brand new] 4. Four key boards and four mouse would cost Rs. 4,000/=[Brand new] Thus all together the whole multi system would cost 42,000.00/= If we tried to purchase four computers as stand alone machines it would cost around 280,000/= (4x70,000/=).

8 Thus there is an added advantage of around Rs. 160,000/=. In other words, a powerful terminal with a LCD monitor will cost Rs /=. and it saves more than 50% of the regular budget. If second hand computer parts are used, a terminal will cost Rs /= which 50% less than the OLPC price in the market. 6.0 Performance We tested the PPC with four terminals. We tested Internet browsing using the Mozilla Firefox browser and that test yield out good performance from the terminal. As shown in the figure 3, CPU utilization is less than 60%. In figure 4 we have plotted the CPU utilization with time when four users have been using Open Office Word. We again obtain good performance and CPU utilization that is less than 60%. In our next step we added some educational softwares which come with ed Ubuntu cd's and got some school going children to use it. There was no considerable performance lost in the PPC as such. 7.0 Conclusion All in all our multi terminal setup, PPC would suit ideally for school laboratories. The main reason could be stated that most of the school going children would not be using complex applications that need huge amount of processing power. Ten PPC could serve up to students depending upon the number of dummy terminals they contain. Thus each school could come up with a computer lab with much less costs. We have been using Ubuntu and its a free and open source software, thus there would not be any additional costs on software. Also there would not be any licensing needed for the software. Each computer would not need any virus guards as Ubuntu is virus free. Thus maintaining the system would be much easy. We will setup our first pilot PPCl laboratory at Dharmasoka College, Ambalangoda. The implementation of this pilot laboratory is financially supported by Internet Society (ISOC), University of Colombo School of Computing and Dharmasoka college Old Boy Association, main branch and Colombo section. 8.0 References [1] Multiseat [2] One laptop per child [3] Free Desktop

9 [4] GDM - The GNOME Display Manager [5] Multi GNOME Terminal [6] Documentation for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS [7] Xserver-X Window System display server [8] Linux Multi Terminal [9] GNOME Display Manager [10] X window manager Fig 1: Multi terminal setup Fig 2 : Multiple VGA s connected

10 Fig 3: CPU utilization when four users were surfing the internet Fig 4 : CPU utilization when Open office was used by four users