The Computer Science Department facilities have evolved from a single mainframe computing environment to a heterogeneous system of distributed workstations. The department has workstations and servers running Linux, Solaris, MacOS, and Windows all connected by a segmented Gigabit ethernet network.
The J Mack Adams undergraduate lab is based on high-end PC hardware running 64bit Linux operating system. At present, the lab consists of 63 HP and Acer MultiCores workstations. Two laser printers for classwork purposes are also available. SH 118B classroom has been built out of part of the J Mack Adams lab, and has 40 HP notebooks running 64bit Suse Linux. The classroom also has three fixed LCD projectors which project onto a writeable surface and are controlled from an instructor’s console.
The graduate student lab has high-end Intel machines running 64 bit Suse Linux, and laser printing facilities. Many graduate students also share computing resources with their advising faculty members in special-purpose laboratories. In addition, every graduate student with an office has one Windows, Mac or Linux host for access to the shared computing facilities of the department.
The research facilities of the department consist of a great variety of machines located in faculty offices, graduate and special purpose labs. These include many PC-based platforms (running a variety of operating systems), as well as several special-purpose parallel computing platforms including a Sun v890 SMP, multi-processor Sun workstations, small clusters and a large cluster consiting of 192 processor cores.
The Computer Operations Group (COG) operates the department’s computing facilities. A large body of software is installed and maintained by this group, and direct support is provided for research projects through identification, acquisition, installation and consulting for a wide variety of software and hardware products. The COG is responsible for the Unix system administration of approximately 1000 undergraduate, graduate and faculty users. Account creation, monitoring and deletion are ongoing activities. The department’s multiple terabytes of on-line storage is also managed by this group.
