INTRODUCTION

The Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers an undergraduate major for the Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Arts degree in the College of Letters and Sciences. The department also offers graduate programs leading to the Master of Science degree and Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Sciences. The undergraduate major program may be used as a second major by students majoring in other subjects. This Guidebook is intended for undergraduate students intending to major in Computer Sciences. It contains all departmental rules and regulations regarding the undergraduate major program. Students should consult other materials for rules concerning other aspects of their degree programs. The information in this Guidebook should also be supplemented by individual consultation with the Undergraduate Advising Committee so that the individual student's needs and interests are met. Additional information about the Department is available on the World-Wide Web (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/).

Faculty

The Department currently has fifty-two faculty members (including several with joint appointments in other departments). Areas of specialization in the Department include artificial intelligence, computer architecture and VLSI, database systems, mathematical programming, modeling and analysis of computer systems, numerical analysis, operating systems, programming languages and compilers, and theory of computing. A separate publication, the ``Computer Sciences Department Annual Report,'' lists the faculty in the Department, active research projects, research facilities, and recent colloquia.

Computer Facilities

The Department contains a large array of sophisticated computer hardware which supports both our research and instructional missions. This equipment is maintained by a central facility, the Computer Systems Laboratory. We are continuously upgrading and enhancing our systems to offer the most up-to-date computing resources possible. Much of the equipment was donated by our industrial affiliates; their support has been invaluable in enabling us to develop a first-rate computing environment.

All faculty, supported graduate students (i.e., TA's, RA's, and Fellows), and staff have high-performance workstations on their desks. These machines include various models of Sun, Intel based and AMD based workstations. Desktop workstations run one of Windows 2000, RedHat Linux or Solaris.

The Department is recognized as a national leader in research on parallel and distributed computing. Current work involves experimental design of both parallel algorithms and computer architectures in support of a wide range of projects, including mathematical programming, parallel-program debugging tools, performance modeling and analysis, computer vision, databases and many others. The Topaz and PRISM projects, funded by NSF Institutional Infrastructure grants, have enabled the Department to acquire parallel hardware to enhance this work. Components of our parallel computing environment include clusters of 100 dual processor Xeon CPU's, 150 dual processor PIII's, 70 one processor Pentium 4's, a 16 node SP3, a 32 node Netra cluster and 6 SUN Enterprise servers used to perform simulations and experiments on large-scale parallel architectures and large-scale parallel computations.

A locally developed software package called Condor provides additional computing power for compute-bound tasks such as simulations. Condor automatically locates workstations which are idle and transfers jobs to them. The jobs are periodically checkpointed and migrate from machine to machine until completion. Studies of Condor showed that jobs submitted to Condor made use of over 180 CPU-days per week of otherwise wasted machine cycles.

All of our research and instructional facilities are connected to local area networks, each of which is connected to every other and to the Internet by routers. The network allows remote and automated use of departmental resources and information sharing. There are currently about 3 Terabytes of storage available to most of our machines through the AFS distributed file system. Much of the research information produced by the Department is made freely available to the world through our Web server.

In addition to the research facilities, the Department has a number of workstations to support work in undergraduate and graduate courses. These include 60 UltraSPARC 10 workstations, 100 Intel PIII based workstations running Windows 2000, 40 Intel PIII based workstations running RedHat Linux. Our instructional laboratories support more than 2000 students each semester.

Enrollment

73 B.S., 55 M.S., and 11 Ph.D. degrees were conferred by the Department on average during each of the last few years. There are approximately 200 undergraduate majors and 200 graduate students in the Department. Graduate student support currently includes approximately 8 fellowships, 50 research/project assistantships, and 100 teaching assistantships.

Computer Sciences is a very popular field. Enrollment in Computer Sciences courses grew at a rate of 15-20% per year for many years, but has recently leveled off. The Computer Sciences department is now able to meet the demand for most courses, but some course enrollments may be restricted due to either insufficient instructional staff or limited available equipment. The major in Computer Sciences is an intellectually challenging course of study. Graduates of this major have been successful in many different professional careers or continued their studies in one of the top graduate schools of the country.