The Department of Computer Science provides state of the art computer facilities for its staff and students. The two largest systems are for staff and undergraduate use, but research groups have equipment of their own and there are a number of miscellaneous computers for special purposes. Access is available (conditions apply) to advanced computing facilities elsewhere on campus.
Use of all ANU computer facilities is subject to official guidelines.
The staff system is used by all staff, graduate students, and
official visitors. About 40 Sun workstations and servers, with about
15 X terminals, form a single Unix environment.
Six servers provide resources to the department:
The department has four networked laser printers and one colour inkjet printer for use by staff system computers.
About 15 Macintosh personal computers are used as desktop machines and there is one AppleShare server. These have full access to all network resources at the ANU and elsewhere. Macintosh users have accounts registered on the Unix servers for email.
One shared Macintosh on the second floor may be used by all staff for graphics and document preparation. It has a HP scanner, a Polaroid slide maker, and applications such as PhotoShop and Illustrator. A QuickTake digital camera is also available.
A few Intel PCs, running Windows or Linux, are also used within the department. Like the Macintoshes, they have full access to the DCS network but the users should have accounts registered on the Unix servers.
Staff may also have accounts on the various research computer systems, which co-exist with the staff computer systems on the same network.
Staff system equipment is bought and maintained by the department and managed by the Technical Support Group.
The student system for undergraduate teaching is three Sun servers and 100 X terminals in the ground floor teaching labs. Although physically within the DCS building, these machines are on a separate subnet that is isolated to some extent from the rest of ANU and the Internet. DCS students, staff involved in teaching, and part-time tutors all have accounts on the student system.
The student servers are iwaki and challender. Both machines can be selected from the chooser in each lab.
Information for undergraduate students, including course notes, is
available from the department's web server. The
department runs an Oracle database software on
karajan. The server is accessible from the student
servers (and certain staff machines) in a seamless manner via the
sqlplus client.
A fifth lab, N113, is served by yttrium which is part of the Engineering department. DCS students may use this lab by logging on to one of the DCS servers.
The undergraduate system equipment is bought and maintained by TLTSU but software installation and much of the day to day operation is handled by DCS.
Honours students at DCS have their own Sun server, mehta, and a lab of X terminals. Honours students have access to additional software, considerably more disk space, and full access to the network resources of the ANU and Internet.
Also on this subnet is the student PC Lab, containing Intel PCs running Linux. This is used for teaching a unit about operating system design and implementation.
Co-existing with the departmental staff system are a number of other research computer systems.
A Fujitsu AP1000 parallel machine (a.k.a Cellular Array Processor or CAP) is located within the department as part of the ANU-Fujitsu CAP Project.
The CAP team also have a Sun server, cafe, as a gateway to the ANU network and a number of Sun and Macintosh desktop computers for their own use.
The MIDAS multimedia project owns a collection of Sun servers, disk storage, real time compression/decompression hardware and FDDI network equipment. The principal user of this equipment is currently the PASTIME project but the equipment may be available for other use by arrangement.
The High Performance Computing Laboratory is a lab of SGI Indy workstations within the DCS building. The HPC Lab is a collaborative effort between FEIT and the ANU Supercomputer Facility, who manage the system.
Within the department are a number of stand-alone computers for special purposes. All are on subnet 164.
Silicon Graphics donated samba, an Origin 200, as the Web/FTP server for Andrew Tridgell's Samba software package.
The Computer Science Students Association provide web pages and software to students from a Sun workstation, cssa.
Brahe is a Sun workstation used by part-time tutors and academics for marking and other administrative work.