Computing Facilities

Server Room at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering

The Department is served by about 600 workstations and PCs, including those in four teaching labs: two PC Labs, one Linux lab and a multi-media Lab. Each teaching lab has 41 sets of computers networked together, a LCD projector, and at least one highspeed laser printer. In addition, the multi-media lab is equipped with professional grade amplifiers, speakers, synthesizers, Sound Blaster Audigy sound cards, and 3D graphics cards. Wireless stations of speed 11 Mbps were installed in early 2001 to allow wireless Internet access for all teaching and research labs in the Department. The teaching labs are upgraded frequently to keep the equipment current.

The Department also runs several research labs. All have a number of PCs, SUN ULTRA stations, servers, and special hardware/software to support specific research. The Computer Engineering Lab has a PowerHub, some wireless modems and multi-media workstations, as well as several notebook computers with video cameras. The Database Lab maintains various database management systems such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Servers, as well as software engineering packages like Rational Rose and Orbix. There are four rack-mounted servers primarily for database group research, three servers are running IBM DB2/MySQL/Oracle on Linux and one is running IIS on Microsoft Windows accessing Microsoft SQL server databases. The Vision and Graphics Lab is for computer graphics and vision research. It is equipped with a video server for video and graphics production, high-end graphics and video editing cards, DV player and etc., as well as Adobe Photoshop, Primiere, FlashMX, CorelDraw and Dreamweaver as software editing tools. There are also specialized project labs, including the Human Language Technology Center (with various corpora and Linux clusters); the Cyberspace Center with a large assortment of Internet related software (Ecommerce packages, different Web server software, multi-media support packages, etc.) and smart card hardware and software.

The Department also manages a pool of SUN servers - ranging from Ultra30s to SunFire 3800 Server, from single CPU to 8 CPUs architectures - as CPU cluster for the projects that demand significant CPU power and system resources. In particular, our SunFire 3800 Server is equipped with 8 900MHz UltraSparc III processors. Each CPU is with 8MB L2 Cache. The system is with 8GB of physical memory and redundancy hardware running Solaris 9. Our file servers are connected with the Storage Area Network (SAN), which is a Hitachi 9200 Thunder, with a total capacity of 1.3TB, and a Hitachi AMS 200, with a total capacity of 3TB. Each file server connects to the SAN by a pair of optical fibres, each at 1Gbps or 4Gbps. All computing facilities in the Department are connected by highspeed Ethernet switches to the University's gigabit network backbone. Internet access overseas is via 45 Mbps HARNET connection and a 10 Mbps ATM link to Worldcom. There is also a 2 Mbps connection to CERNET (China Academic & Research Network) and a 10Mbps connection to TANET (Taiwan Academic Network).

The Department is committed to keeping its computing facilities up-to-date.