Computing Facilities
Computer Science Department Facilities
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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 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 seven staff system
administrators.
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 300 GB of disk storage. All faculty and many
graduate students have a Sun, Silicon Graphics, Pentium II, or
X display station on
their desk.
Computing systems used by students enrolled in both undergraduate and
graduate computer science courses include over 80 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.
The department operates both special-purpose output devices as well
as general output equipment, including about 60 laser printers, color
printers, color scanners, and video projectors.
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.
Twenty-eight
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 and ADSL connections are in use for
remote access from a number of nearby sites.
Purdue University Computing Center Facilities
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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.
1998
Annual Research Report
Department of
Computer Sciences
