The School of Computing provides state of the art computing facilities for both instructional and research use. Both facilities share a common network infrastructure that is based on an ATM fabric running at OC-12 (622 Mbps) and that provides desktop connections at speeds ranging from Fast Ethernet (100 Mpbs) up to Gigabit Ethernet where necessary. The School's network attaches via an OC-12 connection directly to the campus OC-48 ATM mesh, which in turn routes traffic to Abilene (Internet 2), vBNS, and the Internet.
In addition to the shared network infrastructure, the core School of Computing facility supplies many centralized services, including shared disk space (4 Terrabytes), time, web/cgi, ftp, firewall, backups, printing resources, and email. Most services run on Solaris-based hosts, ranging from Ultra 10's to an Enterprise 5000. Several large-scale Solaris and Linux machines are also made available for general use.
The instructional computing facility includes over 180 Unix, Linux, and Windows-based machines. Most of these machines are organized into three laboratories and the remainder are situated in graduate student offices. The NT Lab in EMCB 210 includes approximately 90 Pentium II-based PCs. The electronic classroom in MEB 3225 contains 30 Pentium III-based PCs arranged into a classroom configuration. The CES/Grad Lab in MEB 3161 contains nine SGI workstations. Students in the School of Computing also have access to the College of Engineering Workstation Laboratory, which consists of five servers, more than 100 Sun workstations, and approximately 10 Linux workstations.
The research computing facility is a heterogeneous mix of over 300 machines, including SGI, HP, Sun and Intel-based hardware. The research computing facility includes major laboratories devoted to computer-aided design and graphics, computer systems, asynchronous digital systems and VLSI, robotics and vision, scientific computing and imaging, and information retrieval and natural language processing. These research laboratories contain a wide array of specialized equipment, including
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.