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Bluepoint is a non-profit Open Source education and development center. It is the first organization in the Philippines to focus on Linux and Open Source training.
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 Thank you so much for the training opportunity you gave us last year. We have been progressing very well. We have two labs in our only public school running on Fedora Core 5 LTSP. We also have three of our biggest grade schools doing the same thing. Our back end service is using Xen and FC5. |
- Warren Fukuichi
Palau Ministry of Education
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Leverage the collective expertise of Bluepoint Institute and Bluepoint Foundation for your virtual Linux-based enterprise infrastructure and outsourced system administration requirements.
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Follow Us  RSS is a format for delivering dynamic web content. We syndicate our updates as RSS feeds that you can subscribe to and aggregate from. | | Buhawi Sunday, Dec 21, 1997, 12:00 AM
bu•ha•wi - buh•wi' ('b•-'h•-'wE) - noun
1: a Filipino word for tornado - a violent cyclonic storm, relatively small in diameter but with rapidly rotating winds that form a funnel cloud, or vortex, and that moves over land.
2: a stripped-down, server-optimized Linux distribution developed at the Bluepoint Institute's Open Source Education and Development Center.
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Lalainya Wednesday, May 2, 2001, 12:00 AM
la•la•in•ya - (l•-l•-'in, &n, &n-'y) - noun
1: a mecha in Masami Kurumada's 16-volume manga B't X, the 25-episode anime of which was translated into Filipino by a local television network - possibly a loose Filipino translation or invented word.
2: an experimental high performance computing (HPC) cluster built from commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) components at the Bluepoint Institute's Open Source Education and Development Center.
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|  | Lalainya, part of the High Performance Computing (HPC) project of the Bluepoint Institute of Higher Technology Foundation, is an experimental parallel computer built from commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) components.
Specifically, Lalainya is a supercomputer composed of heterogeneous, relatively obsolete machines running on Buhawi Linux with the openMosix kernel extension for single-system image clustering and equipped with PVM and MPI message passing software. The machines are tied together by a full-duplex switched network using equipment donated by 3Com. It serves as the test bed for Bluepoint's cluster computing, parallel I/O and parallel-parallel supercomputing projects.
Lalainya will continue to grow as donations, especially hardware which many consider as obsolete, come in from different organizations and individuals. |
This is also one example of a Beowulf cluster, which is a concept developed at NASA. The model includes not only off-the-shelf hardware but also the use of freely available operating systems such as Linux, message passing software such as PVM and MPI, and other Open Source software. More information on the Beowulf concept and links to other sites with these machines are available from the Beowulf Project page and the Beowulf mailing list FAQ.
The name Lalainya was derived from a mecha in Masami Kurumada's 16-volume manga B't X, the 25-episode anime of which was translated into Filipino by ABS-CBN. Lalainya (this might be a loose Filipino translation) is a "BT" or "Robotix," an ultimate machine that has surpassed the level of ordinary robots, made with a legendary "Spirit Beast" as a model, a hydra in this case. This mechanical hydra aptly symbolizes Bluepoint's high performance cluster - it has many heads and one body, similar to the Beowulf cluster which has many nodes acting as one supercomputer.
For additional information about Lalainya, e-mail Engels Antonio (engels at bluepoint.com.ph), cluster administrator and HPC project PR droid. You can also visit the Bluepoint Institute of Higher Technology Foundation (BIHTF) site for updates about the organization.
Many thanks to Pio del Pilar Educational Institution, Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP), Wejeatech Corporation, and Saudi Investment Group and Marketing (SIGMA) for sending their retired hardware our way. |
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Guro Tuesday, Oct 8, 2002, 12:00 AM
gu•ro - g•ro ('g•-rO) - noun
1: a Filipino word for teacher, tutor, or instructor - one that teaches; especially : one whose occupation is to instruct.
2: a web-based courseware builder based on PHP and MySQL developed at the Bluepoint Institute's Open Source Education and Development Center.
Guro allows teachers and others who want to share their knowledge to easily develop accessible courses, complete with exams, for their students. Companies can also create customized training programs for their staff. Guro makes this possible via a very user-friendly and flexible interface. The base system is open source and new features can be added via phpBB-style MODS.
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Kartero Thursday, Feb 5, 2004, 10:30 PM
kar•te•ro - kart•ro ('k•r-'te-'rO) - noun
1: a Filipino word for postman, mailman, or letter carrier - someone who delivers the mail.
2: a Bluepoint Foundation project that provides low-cost e-mail access to public schools, local government units, non-profit and religious organizations in connectivity challenged areas of the Philippines.
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Linux Server and E-mail Service Donation to Bulan South District
Thu Feb 5 22:30:14 PHT 2004
Aside from faculty and staff, more than 2,500 basic education department students from public schools under the Department of Education Bulan South District office will receive e-mail addresses which they will hopefully use not just for communication, but for research and FTP via e-mail as well.
Issues
Poor local communications infrastructure. The limited number of installed landlines are unreliable, especially during inclement weather. Furthermore, these support incoming calls only. The nearest ISP is several miles away. Access rates are too steep.
Solution
We installed Buhawi on an old HP Vectra and configured it as an e-mail kiosk using mgetty, uucp, Sendmail, IMAP, Apache, PHP, and SquirrelMail. Bluepoint will receive all e-mail for bsd.bicol.bluepoint.com.ph. Spam and virus infected mails will be discarded to ensure that only legitimate messages are sent to Bicol via UUCP.
To-Do
Landlines are limited and unreliable, but there are quite a number of cellsites! We'll use a mobile phone as backup, and switch it over to primary if it proves to be more reliable.
Credits
Many thanks to Rene Enriquez of Saudi Investment Group and Marketing for the HP Vectra units and other peripherals that he shipped to us from the Middle East.
We Do Not Exist?!
Mon Jul 4 20:00:15 PHT 2005
We submitted Kartero in the ICT4D/IDRC project's recent call for proposals aiming to document ICT4D projects in the Philippines. Unfortunately, they did not consider our proposal because they were "looking for existing projects or projects that have been implemented which the author could analyze and write into a case study." It seems that as far as they're concerned, the Kartero project does not exist.
Ouch, that takes a lot away from the people who've been working on this project for more than a year now. We may not have gone fast and wide, what with our limited resources, but the project definitely exists!
Bluepoint will continue to run Kartero for as long as our target organizations need it. And we will analyze and document the project's impact on its beneficiaries, grants or no grants. |
Broadband Roadkill?
Wed July 5 22:39:00 PHT 2006
Kartero is a very affordable, low-technology solution for far-flung areas where there is the minimum of telecom technology installed or available. It is designed to provide mass e-mail services with the part-time use of non-dedicated telecom resources, be it wired or wireless.
Even in these times of 24x7 broadband access and expanding ranges of wireless connectivity, this project remains a viable alternative for those who may need internet connectivity the most.
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