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Computing Facilities
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Computer Science Department Facilities
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 who are not only responsible
for the installation and maintenance of the systems, but who also assist
faculty and students in the development of software systems for research
projects. The staff includes a director, facilities manager, administrative
assistant, secretary, two hardware engineers, and five staff programmers.
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 four Sun multiprocessor systems and several Sun and
Windows NT file servers. The main systems each have 128 to 256 MB of main
memory and a total of over 50 GB of disk storage. All faculty and many
graduate students have a Sun, Silicon Graphics, or X display station on
their desk.
Educational Facilities
Computing systems used by students enrolled in both undergraduate and
graduate computer science courses include over 50 Intel Pentium-based PCs
running either Sun Solaris or Windows NT. Three rooms in the Computer Science
Building are dedicated to laboratory-based instruction using these facilities.
A later section (Purdue University Computing Center Facilities) lists equipment
owned and maintained by the Computing Center but used by computer science
students.
I/O Equipment
The department operates both special-purpose output devices as well
as general output equipment, including about 50 laser printers, color printers,
color scanners, and video projectors.
Networking Services
The department is strongly committed to state-of-the-art networking
technology to provide access to and communication among its systems, as
well as to those elsewhere on campus and throughout the world. Sixteen
Ethernets in the Computer Science Building connect the workstations and
network terminal concentrators to the departmental computing facilities.
An ATM fabric currently supports 45 workstations, and a fiber-optic ATM
link connects departmental systems to other systems on campus, as well
as to the Internet community. ISDN connections are in use for remote access
from a number of nearby sites.
Purdue University Computing Center Facilities
In addition to the facilities described above, students and faculty
have access to computing systems owned and operated by the Purdue University
Computing Center (PUCC). General instructional facilities operated by PUCC
include a large Sun SPARCserver, an IBM 3090, and several Sun, Mac, and
Windows laboratories. In addition, PUCC provides systems for use in courses
taught by the CS Department. These systems include Sun SPARC 5 workstations
for undergraduate computer science courses and IBM-compatible personal
computers for use in an introductory course for non-majors (CS 110). Departmental
research projects make use of other facilities provided by PUCC, including
an Intel Paragon and IBM SP/2.
CS Annual Report - 1 June 1998