Institute Labs

The Institute develops and maintains several computer and electronics laboratories and the computing and networking infrastructure that supports them.

The information on this page summarizes the computing resources available. Use the following link to ACCESS SPECIFIC INFORMATION ABOUT THE LABS.

Students and faculty use the laboratory equipment in their academic pursuits,including instruction in software use, developing programs for coursework,graduate capstone projects and other directed research, and faculty research.

Most labs are open 24x7 -- all day (24 hours), every day.

Information stored in designated areas such as the user's home directory is designed to be accessible locally -- within the labs --as well as remotely (e.g., from the student's home computer). It is backed up regularly to provide data integrity and availability.

General Development Labs [DOU110, SCI106, SCI108]

The computer workstations in these labs are designed to be uniform in functionality. Uniformity allows a student to choose any available seat to, for example, design, code, and test programs and databases, and/or create documents and spreadsheets. These workstations support the core curriculum and some of the coursework of the electives; consequently,they have many software applications installed that are of broad applicability.

Software such as the operating system, web browsers, secure file transfer,and office-type software (e.g., word-processing and spreadsheet) form the base level. On top of this is software that is related to coursework or has great utility in doing coursework, such as compilers, editors, remote access mechanisms, graphics programs, math programs, and database access clients. None of this software is designed to be changed by the user,and some of the software has restrictions on its use.

Student-Administered Lab [SCI113]

Allowing students to administer a computer for coursework is very powerful and educational. However, it is not desirable to do this in a general-development lab, as the state of the workstation's computer would be unknown after each student used it.

The solution for this is to use removable hard drives with pre-installed software on the drive, and empty drive bays in the computers in a special room. Students insert a pre-assigned disk drive cartridge into the empty drive bay and may either:

• use the pre-installed software as-is and optionally configure it differently,
• install new software, or
• overwrite the entire disk with a new operating system installation.

When the student is finished with the computer session, the drive cartridge is removed from the computer and secured in an assigned lab locker.This allows the next student to reuse that computer workstation with their own removable hard drive, thereby changing the computer's "personality" or, more accurately, its functionality.

Basically, the students have complete control over the operating system and applications for the duration of the course.

Teaching and Research Labs [SCI104, CP206D, CP206H, CP206I, CP206M]

Most of these labs are focused on specific areas of computing, such as Embedded Computing Systems or Applied Distributed Computing. These labs are meant for both instructional demonstrations, capstone projects and other specialized faculty research and teaching needs. These labs are:

• Applied Distributed Computing
• Embedded Computing Systems
• Informatics and Artificial Intelligence
• Information Assurance and Networking
• Simulation Science

Each specialized lab has a faculty lab manager who functions as the contact person and primary person responsible for that lab.

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