Departmental Facilities

The Departmental Computing Facility is configured to support both instructional and research computing. The instructional facility, or General Computing Facility (GCF), includes more than 130 Unix workstations from Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment, and Sun; 30 Hewlett-Packard Pentium/NT machines; and 30 X terminals. These machines are supported by ten file/application servers that provide a total of 200 GByte of disk storage via both NFS file systems and 40 GB of application replicated across five AFS servers. The instructional machines are interconnected with these multi-homed NFS/AFS application/file servers via ethernets, fast ethernet, and FDDI rings. Students in the Department also have access to the College of Engineering's workstation laboratory, which consists of five file/application servers and over 100 Unix workstations from Sun and Hewlett-Packard.

The Research Computing Facility (RCF) includes more than 330 Unix workstations from DEC, HP, Sun, IBM, and SGI; and Pentium NT machines from various vendors. These machines are supported by 20 file/application servers that provide a total of 500 GByte of NFS/AFS disk storage and are supported by the same AFS applications server as in the instructional environment. These common AFS application servers allow the research and instructional computing environment to be easily traversed by both researcher and student. The research computing facility is interconnected with ethernets, fast ethernets, and FDDI rings.

The individual research laboratories contain a wide array of specialized equipment, including

an SGI Origin 2000 Reality Monster (60 processors, 8 IR heads);
an SGI Power Challenge (12 processors);
an SGI Power Onyx (4 processors, 2 RE2 heads);
a variety of specialized equipment for image analysis, including a GRF-2 light striper and a DIGI-BOT II laser range scanner;
two FDDI/Fast Ethernet clusters comprised of IBM RS 6000s, HP 700s, and SGI Indigo2s;
a collection of graphics workstations from each workstation vendor;
a multi-source video editing environment;
robot arms;
specialized D/A and A/D equipment for realtime signal processing.

The College of Engineering operates a research-scale integrated circuit (IC) fabrication facility that is used extensively by Computer Science. Equipment for testing and debugging both internally and externally fabricated circuits is housed in an integrated circuit testing facility that contains state-of-the-art HP, Tektronix and Micromanipulator automated IC testing equipment.

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