Computing Facilities

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 a Gigabit Ethernet and that provides desktop connections at speeds ranging from Fast Ethernet (100 Mbs) 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 Linux-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 almost 200 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 Undergraduate Lab in EMCB 210 includes more than 100 Athlon based PC's; roughly 85 of those run Windows XP and the rest are Linux systems. The electronic classroom in MEB 3225 contains 30 Pentium III-based PCs arranged into a classroom configuration. The Student Project Lab (MEB 3105) contains 5 stations with Pentium IV processors and overhead projectors where groups of students can work in groups on software development projects. The CES/Grad Lab in MEB 3161 contains 13 Linux boxes with Athlon processors. Wireless access is available to department machines throughout the School of Computing.

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. Wireless access is available for these machines in the classroom building.

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

an SGI Origin 3800 (32 processors);
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 nonlinear video editing environment;
a real-time signal processing lab;
an image analysis lab;
equipment for various types of custom hardware design;
a Sarcos Dextrous Arm, Utah/MIT Dextrous Hand, and PUMA 560 robots; and
a 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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