Graduate Student Handbook

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Chapter 10

Computational Facilities

The Department operates a major computational facility in room KH 247. Numerous SUN workstations, as well as SGI graphics workstations and color laser printers are available. Through the UNIX network, students can access the computational facilities at NASA Langley, NASA Ames (NAS), as well as NSF supercomputer centers and the world-wide Internet. To gain access to this facility, students should request an application from the Department, GPD, or Computational Facilities Director. The computer facilities available to the Department include:

The University facilities include the campus network infrastructure and a single high-performance workstation - an IBM RS/6000 Model 590 with 256MB RAM and about 20 GB of disk storage. This system is for research computing only.

The College facilities include the college within building network infrastructure and a Computer-Aided Engineering Laboratory with an IBM RS/6000 Model 370 workstation as the file server and compute server plus approximately 20 IBM RS/6000 Model 220 graphics workstations. Recently, a second server (SUN-ULTRA-30) and several client workstations (SUN-ULTRA-10) have been added. This lab is used primarily for instruction related to MSC/NASTRAN and PATRAN.

The Department facilities include mostly SUN SPARC 5 workstations with a SUN SPARC 10 Model 51 with 320 MB RAM and about 20 GB of disk storage. The SPARC 10 serves as the file server and also a compute server. The Sun system currently uses the SUNOS 4.1.4 operating system and plans are to transition to Solaris 2.5 or higher in mid 1998. The plan also includes the addition of 20 GB of disk storage, a SUN-ULTRA-60 and several SUN-ULTRA-10 workstations. In addition, we have an SGI Indigo 2 XZ workstation with the R4400 processor, the Galileo graphics system, 384 MB RAM and approximately 10 GB of disk space. The SGI is used for computations as well as visualization and animation of simulations. With the Galileo processor and breakout box, we can directly connect a Super VHS edition VCR to the system for recording animation movies. We also have an SGI O2 workstation with the R10000 processor and 1 GB of RAM memory. Several high-end Pentium II processor PC's are also available. Apple Macintosh Quadra 800 is available for presentation development.

The Department also has facilities off-campus at the VCES offices in Hampton. These facilities are primarily SUN SPARC UNIX workstations networked together and tied to the NASA Langley network through a T1 connection.

For the most part, our research projects use in-house codes or software in the public domain where we have the source code. For the instructional aspects, we use MATLAB and various Toolboxes, Mathematica, IMSL Fortran Library, and TECPLOT.

It is extremely important that students restrict their use of these facilities to class or research work. Unauthorized use will result in sanctions by the Department, such as suspension of access privileges. Examples of unauthorized use include the use of E-mail for file transfers or personal communications.