In 1987 the departments of
Computer Science
and
Electrical & Computer Engineering
moved into the newly-constructed Computer Studies
Building, shared with the
Chester Carlson Science and
Engineering Library.
There is ample space for a wealth of laboratories, several of which are
highlighted below.
Department machines are connected by a variety of local area networks, most operating at 1Gb/s. The University as a whole has been cited as one of Yahoo's “most wired” campuses, with a Gigabit backbone and Internet 2 connectivity through the New York State Educational and Research Network (NYSERnet). Departmental workstations are primarily x86/Linux boxes, with a mixture of additional, Sun, Alpha, SGI, Apple, and Wintel machines.
Compute platforms for research in Computer Systems include a 32-processor IBM pSeries 690 “Regatta” multiprocessor; 16- and 8-processor SunFire multiprocessors; an 8-core, 32-thread Sun T1000 (“Niagara”) multiprocessor; and a 72-node, 144-processor IBM-branded Linux cluster. The Regatta machine is equipped with 1.3GHz IBM Power4 processors and 32GB of memory. The SunFire machines have 1.2GHz and 900 MHz UltraSparc 3 processors, respectively. The Linux cluster has a mixture of Pentium III and 4 processors, with a minimum of 2GB of memory per 2-processor node, connected by Gigabit Ethernet.
Other local resources include a variety of smaller 2-, 4-, and 8-processor machines. The group has access to a 32-processor SGI Origin and other resources at the University's Laboratory for Laser Energetics, and to additional machines at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Rochester is also a member of the PlanetLab worldwide network testbed. In April 2008 the University took delivery of an 84-node, 672-core IBM Linux cluster with peak performance of more than 8TFflops; members of the CCS group are active users of this resource.
