Computing Facilities
Computing Facilities
The department is located in a new facility within the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering. Our fiber backbone network hosts both teaching and research laboratories supported by the Department’s Systems Operations Group. The Systems Operations Group supports student and faculty research missions with critical knowledge and materials support. The Department maintains Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows, and virtualized systems and services. Low latency and high bandwidth availability through redundant connections to internet core backbones provide our students and faculty with uninterrupted access to leading technology.
The Department maintains six centrally managed instructional labs equipped with personal computers starting at 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 Processors. These PCs run Centos Linux as their base operating system. Windows access is provided by use of terminal server clients which access the Department's bank of Windows 2003 Terminal Servers. VMware, OpenVZ, and User Mode Linux are used in upper-division classes such as Operating Systems and UNIX System Administration, where students use them while doing kernel programming projects. Special hardware and software are provided for classes, including the Cadence and Synopsys software packages for embedded systems design, and Xilinx FPGAs and Intel IXP 1200 and 2400 model network processor boards for embedded systems and network design projects.
Labs are connected to the Department's ten gigabit speed network backbone by fully routed Gigabit Ethernet connections. High bandwidth availablility allows for a range of network experiments. CSE students, faculty, and staff have access to the Department's centrally managed email (including web, email, and secure IMAP) and file service, and are provided with individual web pages. Remote access from home or while travelling is provided via SSH and NX access to Linux compute servers and Windows 2003 Terminal servers.
The architecture laboratory has several multi-core processors for research in application scheduling, network I/O, virtualization, and compilers. Notable among them are Intel Clovertown machines, which are two-processor platform based on the quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5300 series delivering 8-thread, 32- and 64-bit processing capabilities with 8 MB of L2 cache per processor, equipped with 16GB DRAM and 1333 MHz system bus.
The Department has also acquired a 64-processor SGI Altix 4700 supercomputer for research in high-performance computing. The SGI 4700 series is a distributed shared memory (DSM) computer system that scale from 16 to 512 Intel 64-bit Itanium processors as a cache-coherent single system image (SSI) CC-NUMA multiprocessor. The system architecture uses high bandwidth NUMAlink interconnection network (IN) based on Fat Tree topology. The SGI Altix 4700 also adopts SGI RASC™ (Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing) technology and is coupled with the SGI RASC RC100 blade.