About the CS Department Undergraduate Computing Laboratory

The Computer Science Department Undergraduate Computing Laboratory was constructed during 1994-1995 with approximately $170K of funds made available by the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies and the Vice Provost for Computing and Communications. Construction of the laboratory was planned and supervised by Professor Eugene W. Stark together with technical staff member Rick Spanbauer. Other people who played an instrumental role in getting the laboratory built and operational are technical staff member Brian Tria, CS department chairman Philip Lewis, assistant to the CS department chair Kathy Germana, and Larry Noonan in the CEAS Dean's Office. The Lab is constantly being upgraded to try to keep pace with advances in technology. For a history of the changes that have been made since the Lab was first opened, see here.

The user area of the laboratory consists of 38 workstations located in Room 2128 of the Computer Science building. Each workstation is a PC-class machine with an Intel Pentium III/866MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, ATI Rage 128 video card with 32MB RAM, Creative 52X CD-ROM, ASUS micro-ATX motherboard with on-board sound and ethernet, and ViewSonic 19" short-depth monitor. The FreeBSD operating system (a derivative of the 4.4BSD Unix system) serves as the main operating system for the laboratory, though the machines can also run MS-Windows.

Supporting the user workstations are approximately nine server systems and associated networking hardware. An Intel 486DX2/66MHz system running FreeBSD performs name service, time service, and log service, and in addition operates the magnetic card access system that controls access to the user area of the Lab. An Intel Pentium/200MHz system running FreeBSD serves as the gateway to the campus network. Two Pentium/Pentium II-based systems running FreeBSD, equipped with DPT RAID controller hardware and disk arrays, perform user file service. Two AMD K6-2-based systems, running FreeBSD, serve binaries to the user workstations and process mail. An Intel Pentium II 450MHz system with 384MB of RAM, running FreeBSD, hosts the laboratory's World Wide Web server. A Dell PowerEdge server system with dual 3200MHz Xeon processors and 3GB of RAM is a general compute server available for remote user login.

The Lab is connected to the Internet via a 100Mb/sec fiber optic link to the campus network. The core of the internal Lab network is a Cisco 1900 Ethernet switch, which provides twenty-four 10BaseT Ethernet ports and two 100BaseT fast Ethernet ports. The 38 user workstations are grouped into five clusters of 7 or 8 workstations, each cluster using a single 10BaseT port on the Cisco switch. Thus, each cluster of 7 or 8 workstations potentially has a full 10Mb/sec bandwidth connection to the campus network. Other 10BaseT ports on the switch are dedicated to the various server machines. One of the 100BaseT ports leads to the campus network, and the other 100BaseT port hosts the public compute and Web server, and the RAID user file server.

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