Departmental Computing Facilities

The department has continued a major transition of our research and instructional computing from Unix-based platforms to platforms based on Microsoft's Windows NT operating system and Intel Architecture processors. We have benefited greatly over the last year from major ongoing donations of Pentium Pro systems from Intel for research and a donation of 32 Pentium Pro systems from Hewlett-Packard for undergraduate education. We have also received a number of donations of software, training, books, and cash support from Microsoft Corporation. During the past year, we:

• Added 120 Intel Pentium Pro and 30 Intel Pentium systems running Windows NT 4.0.

• Installed Office97 and Visual Studio 97 Professional on all 250 Windows NT systems.

• Added over 250Gbytes of on-line disk storage.

• Upgraded our external network connection to 100Mbit Fast Ethernet.

The department has over 500 computers ranging from micros to specialized high-end parallel processors, well over 350Gbytes of on-line disk storage, and a backbone network combining 10Mbit switched Ethernet, 100Mbit FDDI and 100Mbit switched Fast Ethernet.

The department has a full-time computing facilities staff of eight. Dean Krafft serves as director, with programming support provided by Ian Alderman, Doug Flanagan, Orlando Johnson, and Larry Parmelee; hardware support by John Finley; user consulting support by Denise Moore; 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 several FDDI rings connecting organizational Ethernets. National and international access is provided by several T3 connections to NYSERNet and the global Internet.

The department operates an undergraduate teaching laboratory of 50 Intel-donated 120MHz Pentium systems and 30 Hewlett-Packard-donated 200MHz Pentium Pro systems, all running Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0. This lab provides support for a wide range of upper-level undergraduate courses and individual research projects. Finally, through the Theory Center, the Program in Computer Graphics, and the Cornell National Super-computer Facility (CNSF), 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 all computing equipment in the Computer Science Department owned either by Cornell or by the Federal government.

Desktop Machines

Back-end Resources

Other Hardware (not computers)