CIS IT Overview
The CIS department maintains a variety of facilities and equipment to
support the teaching curriculum, research, and daily operational needs
of the department. These assets are managed by the department's IT
staff.
Teaching Labs
The department has four computer labs available exclusively for
scheduled teaching and labs. The three Windows labs are CH430 and
CH145 in Campbell Hall as well as CB15 144 in the 15th St. Classroom
Building. These labs are used to run the lab components of various
CIS courses. The rooms are equipped with a total of 60 student
workstations as well as an instructor station in each room. The rooms
also contain permanent projection systems for multimedia
presentations. The computers in these facilities are running Windows
XP. CH430 and CH145 were upgraded after the Spring 2004 semester to
state of the art 3.0GHz Dell Optiplex systems with 17" LCD flat panel
monitors. The department also maintains a networking lab in
Campbell Hall CH137A. This lab consists of 24 Linux workstations
which are used to simulate real-world networking environments. This
lab also features 17" LCD flat panel monitors.
Open Labs The department has both an undergraduate open
lab (CH154) and a graduate open lab (CH135) in Campbell Hall. The
undergraduate lab houses 15 Windows workstations and 11 Solaris
workstations along with printers and is available to all CIS students.
It is open approximately 100 hours per week and is staffed by a
graduate lab assistant in order to help lab users with the use of the
equipment. Graduate students have 24/7 access to the graduate open
lab, which houses 5 Windows machines and 2 Solaris machines as well as
a printer. Both labs have a mixture of Windows XP and Sun Solaris
machines available for use in completing CIS coursework.
Research Facilities CIS has six research labs to
support the department's research. These labs
contain a total of 32 Windows workstations, 17 Linux/Unix workstations, a
PowerMac G5,
a 32-node (64 processor) AMD Opteron cluster, a 128-node (256 processor) Intel Xeon cluster, a 6-node (12 processor) Opteron visualization cluster and a 8'
x 10' visualisation wall. These labs
are typically available to students working with the supervising
faculty member(s) for that lab, as well as students taking classes
that utilize these resources.
Production Network CIS uses 9 Linux servers, 1 Solaris
server, 2 Windows servers, 4 terabytes of SATA storage and a Qualstar SAIT tape library robot to
service the department's core IT services such as web, mail,
fileserver, user accounts, database and data backup.
Data Center CIS maintains a data center facility. The
facility was upgraded in Fall 2005 and has a capacity
of 40 tons of cooling and 875 Amps of power entering the facility.
The
facility features raised flooring for computer equipment, dedicated
power and cooling resources and remote environment monitoring. The
facility is currently housing 2 racks of servers as well as the
Opteron and Xeon clusters and the tape library robot. This facility is
also used as the buildout bench for department computers.
Software Resources The department provides various
software resources for CIS faculty and students. The department
maintains an MSDNAA subscription which
provides access to Microsoft's software development products, as well
as licenses for popular software packages such as MATLAB, Oracle,
Rational and others. Some of the software is available on the open
lab machines while other packages are available in particular research
labs.
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