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 NT operating system and Intel Architecture processors and the remaining quarter on Unix desktop and back-end servers. We have benefited greatly over the last year from a major donation from Intel of over 60 single and dual-processor Pentium II systems for research and from a separate donation of thirty 300MHz Pentium II systems from Intel for undergraduate education. In addition, Sun Microsystems donated two Sun Ultra Enterprise 450 4-processor servers. We have also received a number of donations of software, training, books, and cash support from Microsoft Corporation. During the past year, we:

	Added over 120 Pentium II systems running Windows NT 4.0.
	Converted the Department's primary Web server to a quad-processor 200MHz Intel Pentium Pro server running Windows NT 4.0 and IIS 3.0.
	Added three Sun Ultra Enterprise 450 servers with over 100GB of on-line disk storage and a 3.8 terabyte tape library.
	Converted our primary network backbone and many desktop connections to switched 100Mbit fast Ethernet.

The Department has over 500 computers, ranging from micros to high-end parallel processing servers, well over 800 GB of on-line disk storage, and a backbone network based on 100 Megabit switched fast Ethernet.

The Department has a full-time computing facilities staff of eleven. Dean Krafft serves as director, with programming support provided by Dora Abdullah, Ian Alderman, Doug Flanagan, Orlando Johnson, and Larry Parmelee; hardware support by John Finley and Bruce Boda; user consulting support by Joy Woller, Elly Cramer, and Alex Gottschalk; and systems administration by Cay Wilson. The staff provides full support for the operating systems and standard software on our major computing platforms.

In addition to the resources directly owned and operated by the department, CS 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.

CS operates an undergraduate teaching laboratory of 30 Intel-donated 300MHz Pentium II systems, 20 Intel-donated 180MHz Pentium systems, and 30 Hewlett-Packard-donated 200MHz Pentium Pro systems, all running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. This lab provides support for a wide range of upper-level undergraduate courses and individual research projects.  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.