Departmental
Computing Facilities
The department makes use of a mix of computing platforms, with about three-quarters of our research and instructional computing taking place on Microsoft's Windows 2000/XP operating system and Intel Architecture processors and the remaining quarter on Red Hat Linux desktop and Red Hat Linux and Sun Solaris back-end servers. We have benefited greatly over the last year from equipment donations from Intel, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft. In the area of improved and upgraded infrastructure, during the past year, we: · Created a new public 20-node
Linux computation cluster, consisting of Dell 1650 systems with dual 1.13GHz
Pentium III processors and 1GB memory. The department has over 1000 computers ranging from desktops to high-end parallel processing servers, over five terabytes of on-line disk storage, and a backbone network based on switched Gigabit Ethernet. The department has a full-time computing facilities staff of fifteen. Dean Krafft serves as director, with programming support provided by Dora Abdullah, Jennifer Holleran, Dean Eckstrom, Doug Flanagan, Bill Holmes, Orlando Johnson, and Larry Parmelee; web development provided by Una Moneypenny; hardware support by John Finley and Bruce Boda; user consulting support by Joshua Gerner, Joseph McGuire, and Eric Brinkman; and systems administration by Cay Wilson. The staff provides full support for all the operating systems and standard software on our major computing platforms. In addition to the resources directly owned and operated by the department, computer science students and researchers have access to a number of university facilities. The university provides extensive campus-wide networking, based on the TCP/IP protocols and implemented through a switched Gigabit Ethernet backbone connecting organizational Ethernets. National and international access is provided by three OC3 connections to the global Internet. High-speed community access is available through Time-Warner's RoadRunner cable modem system and several DSL providers. The department operates an undergraduate teaching laboratory of 30 Intel-donated 450MHz Pentium III systems, 30 Intel-donated 866MHz Pentium III systems, 25 Intel-donated 1.5GHz Pentium 4 systems, and 15 Microsoft-donated 1.8GHz Pentium 4 systems, all running Microsoft's Windows XP Professional. This lab provides support for a wide range of upper-level undergraduate courses and individual research projects. There is also a separate graphics teaching laboratory with 25 HP Visualize fx6+ workstations. Finally, through the Cornell Theory Center and the Program in Computer Graphics, computer science researchers have access to a wide range of advanced parallel processing and supercomputer systems as well as advanced graphics and visualization systems. The following list includes major
computing equipment in the Computer Science Department owned either by Cornell
or by the Federal government. 10 Sun SunRay 214 Intel Pentium
II Desktop PC 5 Terabytes server-based on-line
file storage 1 45-node Linux PIII dual-proc. cluster Other Hardware 10 Color Laser Printers 2 Cisco
Catalyst 5000/5500 Fast Ethernet switches
|