Facilities

Our program has two dedicated labs in the Edwards-Holman Science Center. Systems in both labs are capable of running a variety of operating systems and are upgraded every few years, guaranteeing our students access to the latest hardware and software systems.

Beyond our labs in EHS, faculty offices are located in the adjacent Wood-Mar Hall. Our close proximity to other departments within the College of Engineering facilitates and fosters inter-disciplinary discussion and collaboration.

CS General Lab

The larger general lab is open to students majoring and minoring in CS, IS, Engineering, and Mathematics. The general lab is used for introductory CS and IS courses, and several upper-division lab-based courses. The lab boasts 30 HP Z2 workstations, each equipped with an 8-core Intel i7 CPU, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB NVMe solid state storage, and dedicated gigabit Ethernet connection to the campus network. It also contains multimedia facilities for lectures and lab sessions, and a dedicated server room.

Each workstation has a wide variety of software installed, including numerous IDEs and compilers, text editors, UNIX command-line utilities and shells, office suites, network analysis tools, engineering design and simulation tools, and more. Faculty work closely with our dedicated support staff to ensure students have access to industry-standard tools and applications for coursework and research.

CS Research Lab

The smaller research lab is reserved for CS and IS majors and contains 12 additional HP Z2 workstations and seating for 24 people in a more traditional classroom layout. The research lab is used for upper-division CS, IS, and Engineering courses. The lab also houses dedicated networking, IoT, and cybersecurity hardware and equipment for use in upper-division courses.

CS Research Cluster

The workstations in the CS labs, along with those in various other labs within the College of Engineering, form an on-demand compute cluster used by CS faculty and students for coursework and research. The cluster uses the Slurm workload manager to manage parallel and distributed CPU and GPU compute jobs, and provides support for numerous programming languages (e.g., Python, C, C++) and libraries (e.g., TensorFlow, OpenMPI, CUDA).

Cluster specs:

  • 43 nodes
  • 344 CPU cores (688 threads)
  • 1,472 GB RAM
  • 29.5 TB solid-state storage
Beyond the 42 HP Z2 workstations housed in the various labs, the centerpiece of the cluster is an HP Z8 workstation featuring an 8-core Intel Xeon Gold 6244 CPU, 128 GB ECC RAM, 8.5 TB of solid-state storage, 8 TB of enterprise-grade hard drive storage, and two NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti GPUs with a total of 22 GB VRAM and 8,704 CUDA cores. The Z8 is used by faculty and select upper-division students for rapid prototyping and testing of compute solutions, and joined to the cluster as needed for additional computational power.

Engineering Maker Hub

As part of the College of Engineering, CS students have access to the Maker Hub, a 16,000-square-foot facility equipped with meeting rooms, a large collaboration space, a 24-seat computer lab, and various state-of-the-art design, prototyping, and fabrication equipment.