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The department is dedicated to providing high-quality computing facilities for use by computer science faculty, students, and administrative personnel. The facilities are operated by a technical staff that is responsible for installing and maintaining departmental systems, and for assisting faculty in the development of software systems for research projects.

Full-time staff members include a director, manager, administrative assistant, two hardware engineers, four Unix systems programmers, and one micro-systems technical administrator for Macs and PCs. Talented CS students are employed on an hourly basis to fill several key functions, such as performing operator duties, systems programming, hardware maintenance, and instructional computing laboratory administration.

General Faciliti es
Information Serv ices
I/O Equipment
Networking Servi ces
COAST Laboratory
Collaborative Mo deling and Visualization
CS&E Lab
ELLPACK-PDELab
InterBase
Internetworking and Systems Research Lab
PacsLab
RAID
Scalable Paralle l Algorithms
SERC
SoftLab
Window Systems L ab
Xinu
Purdue Universit y Computing Center

General Facilities

General computing facilities are available for both administrative activities (such as the preparation of research reports and technical publications) and research needs that are not supported by other dedicated equipment. These facilities include two Sun multiprocessor systems, and several Sun file servers. The systems provide almost 600 MB of main memory and 50 GB of disk storage. These systems include two Sun four processor SPARCserver 1000s, with 256 MB of main memory and an accompanying 30 GB disk array.

All faculty members have state-of-the-art Sun or Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations, which are upgraded on a rolling three year plan. In addition, CS graduate students have access to a wide variety of computing equipment, including Sun, SGI, IBM, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) workstations, and HP, Tektronix, and Visual Technology X display stations.

Information Services

The department provides numerous information resources to all of its network users. In addition to providing older services such as ftp and gopher access, much effort has been devoted to developing extensive WorldWide Web (WWW) libraries of information. This new, popular method of browsing the Internet provides information on CS faculty, research projects, graduate and undergraduate program information, links to other Purdue WWW servers, and links to WWW servers world-wide. The URL of our departmental home page is http://www.cs.purdue.edu.

I/O Equipment

The department operates both special-purpose output devices as well as general output equipment, including line printers, color printers, and 30 laser printers. In addition, the department owns approximately 25 terminals and 100 X display stations used throughout the building and elsewhere on campus to connect instructor and graduate student offices to the computing systems. Two dedicated rooms, both open 24 hours, provide students with terminal and printer access.

Networking Services

The department provides state-of-the-art networking technology to access its systems, as well as to those elsewhere on campus and throughout the world. Ethernets in the Computer Science Building connect the workstations and network terminal concentrators to the departmental computing facilities. A fiber-optic link connects departmental systems to other systems on campus, as well as to the Internet community.

The staff has nearly completed the network infrastructure upgrade begun last year. Premium grade category 5 copper wire and multimode fiber have replaced sub-category 3 wiring throughout the CS Building. A centralized, managed concentrator has replaced unmanaged hubs that were previously scattered around the building. New Ethernet and ATM switching equipment has been installed and is now operating over the new wire. Network performance and reliability have improved dramatically, and the time required to install or move computing equipment has been greatly reduced.

Departmental ATM switches are in the process of being linked to an experimental campus backbone ATM switch provided by the Computing Center. Analyzing network throughput on these experimental switches will provide a test bed for proving (or disproving) the concept of an ATM backbone for the campus. CS faculty were instrumental in acquiring funding for this project, and the Computing Center provided a generous amount of cost sharing monies. The Computing Center is studying options to link its supercomputing hardware to this new high-speed backbone, which would provide CS faculty with upgraded network connections to these valuable computing resources.

CS Annual Report - 19 APR 1996

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