Departmental Handbook
University of Utah
Department of Computer Science
50 S Central Campus Dr RM 3190
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9205
(801) 581-8224 (voice)
(801) 581-5843 (fax)
info@cs.utah.edu
http://www.cs.utah.edu
1997-1998
The Department offers Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science and
Computer Engineering. The Computer Science major consists primarily of
software classes, while the Computer Engineering major has more hardware design
classes. In both cases, the curriculum encompasses a general education in
mathematics, science and the humanities, as well as an in-depth study of
computing. The Department also offers a minor for students who want to use
computers in another field or to teach computer science at the secondary school
level. In addition, selected service courses are offered to provide an
introduction to the use of computers as tools for students of many backgrounds
and interests.
Founded in 1965, the Department of Computer Science offers
highly-regarded programs at both the undergraduate and graduate
levels. Department faculty and students did pioneering work in
interactive graphics, stack machine and dataflow architectures,
digital recording, graphical user interfaces, three-dimensional
rendering, asynchronous circuits, video games, computer algebra, and
computer animation. Faculty and alumni have founded a number of
well-known companies, including Adobe Systems, Ashlar, Atari, Cirrus
Logic, Evans & Sutherland, Myricom, Netscape, Pixar, Pixel-Planes,
Silicon Graphics, and Word Perfect.
Graduate students immerse themselves in the research activities of the
department, which currently include:
These research activities are funded from a variety of federal, state,
and industrial sources, including the National Science Foundation
(NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department
of Energy, the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of
Health, the Utah State Centers of Excellence Program, Silicon
Graphics, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. The department is a partner in an
NSF Science and Technology Center for "Computer Graphics and
Visualization" along with Brown, Caltech, Cornell, and the Univesity
of North Carolina; it recently received an NSF Research Infrastructure
award to support research activities requiring high-bandwidth,
low-latency machine-to-machine communications; and it is a key
participant in the University's $20 million Accelerated Strategic
Computing Initiative grant from the Department of Energy.
Graduate students have access to hundreds of Unix and Windows NT
workstations and to the more specialized equipment that resides in the
various research laboratories. This equipment includes a 60 CPU SGI
Origin 2000 with 8 Infinite Reality Engines; SGI Power Challenge,
Power Onyx, and Origin 200 computers; robot arms, mobile robots, and
image digitization and display systems; a variety of visual and
non-visual virtual environment interfaces; a professional-quality
video editing and teleconferencing facility; advanced graphics display
workstations equipped with special-purpose graphics hardware; and a
collection of numerically controlled equipment used to produce
physical prototypes of computer-generated designs.
The University of Utah is committed to policies of equal opportunity,
affirmative action, and nondiscrimination. The University seeks to provide
equal access to its programs, services, and activities for people with
disabilities. Reasonable prior notice is needed to arrange accommodations.
webmaster@cs.utah.edu
asynchronous VLSI systems