Computing Facilities

The School of Computing is divided into two computing environments; one is dedicated to research computing, and the other to general/instructional computing. Both facilities share a common network infrastructure that is based on an ATM fabric running at OC-12 (622 Mbps). The base level of service to the desktop is Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), with the capability to accept OC-3, OC-12, or Gigabit Ethernet connections where necessary. The School's network connects to the campus OC-48 ATM mesh at OC-12 rates that connect to Abilene (Internet 2), and the Internet via tri OC-3 (155 Mbps) pipes.

In addition to the shared network infrastructure, the two facilities share centralized servers providing: firewall, gateway, ftp, news, web/cgi, interactive, file, printing, dialin, dns, ntp, calendar, and integrated Unix and NT user accounts. The services are supported on a range of Solaris-based hosts ranging from Ultra1's to an Enterprise 5000. Backups are automatically performed nightly via a dedicated network to a DTL library.

The General Computing Facility supports both Unix and NT-based operating systems totaling 131 machines. Two major labs make up the bulk of the facility. Both contain Pentium II-based PC's and SGI machines ranging from Indigo2's to O2's. The School of Computing also has access to the College of Engineering Workstation Laboratory, which consists of five servers, 100 Sun Workstations, and twenty-five HP workstations. The machines are divided into two separate rooms and are used for undergraduate and graduate instruction.

The Research Computing Facility consists of a heterogeneous mix of machines from SGI, HP, IBM, Sun, and Intel totaling 238 machines. The major research computing facilities are composed of six laboratories: Computer-Aided Design and Graphics, Computer Systems Laboratory, Asynchronous Digital Systems and VLSI, Virtual Reality and Robotics, Scientific Computing and Imaging, and Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing.

These research laboratories contain a wide array of specialized equipment, including

an SGI Origin 2000 Reality Monster (96 processors, 8 IR heads);
a 200-node network testbed and emulation facility;
an SGI Power Onyx (14 processors, 2 RE2 heads);
a multi-source video editing environment;
Sarcos Dextrous Arm, Utah/MIT Dextrous Hand, and PUMA 560 robots;
Sarcos Treadport locomotion interface, several SensAble Phantom haptic interfaces, Fakespace Responsive Workbench, nVision Datavisor HiRes, and a variety of position trackers;

The College of Engineering operates a research-scale integrated circuit (IC) fabrication facility that is used extensively by the School of Computing. 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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