Computing 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 (TAs, RAs, and Fellows), and staff
have high performance workstations on their desks. These include
various models of DEC (`Alphas,' Celebris Pentium PC's),
Hewlett-Packard (9000/700 `snake' workstations), Sun (SPARCstations),
IBM (RS/6000s) workstations and 200 MHz P6 PC's. Desktop workstations run various flavors
of the Unix operating system. The Department has recently begun to use
Windows NT for various research projects, and will soon support Windows NT
on desktop workstations as well as Unix.
Parallel and Distributed Computing Facilities
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 a
Sequent Symmetry shared-memory multiprocessor,
a 64-node IBM SP2 parallel computer, and a 64-node CM-5 machine from
Thinking Machines Corporation, a 12 prcessor Sparc Enterprise 5000, and the
Cluster
of Workstations
(COW),
The Wisconsin COW
which is a collection of 40 Sun SPARCstation-20 servers
connected by a high-speed network. Each workstation has two processors and
enough memory (64 MB) and local disk space (2 GB) to run large programs.
COW supports a wide
range of experiments and is itself an experiment in building supercomputers
using the highest performance computing and networking components available,
with little custom hardware.
A recent addition to this parallel infrastructure is the Cluster of Personal
Computers (COPcS), which is a collection of 20 dual processor Pentium's
connected with fast ethernet. Each PC has 128 MB of memory, and 12 GB
of local disk space for large database experiments.
CONDOR Distributed Resource Management
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 it made use of over 180 CPU-days per week of otherwise wasted
machine cycles.
Network Services
Most 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 is currently over 300 Gigabytes of
storage available to most of our machines though the AFS distributed file
system. Much of the research information produced by the Department is made
freely available to the world through
our World-Wide Web server.
Instructional Facilities
In addition to the research facilities, the Department has a number
of workstations to support work in undergraduate and graduate courses.
These include 36 SPARCstation 10 and 40 SPARCstation 20 workstations. In 1994
Hewlett-Packard donated a laboratory of IBM compatible Vectra 486 workstations
to support undergraduate computer science education. Additional instructional
equipment, used for introductory programming courses, includes Apple Macintosh
computers. Our instructional laboratories support more than 2000 students
each semester.
The Department also supports an
Undergraduate Projects Laboratory
which allows students to do independent study projects on Unix workstations.
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