Research Facilities

Departmental:

The Department has extensive computing facilities that are devoted to the research needs of the faculty and graduate students. These facilities are administered cooperatively with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. Some specialized machines are used jointly by the two departments.

The ECE/CIS Joint Laboratory radiates from the central facilities center in Evans Hall. This center connects together an extensive network of approximately 450 CIS computers and other more specialized research facilities.

The center in Evans Hall houses all the server, file storage, and networking facilities central to CIS research needs. It contains a single large server with a fully modernized disk subsystem; a ten Gigabit Ethernet switch that provides high performance, security, and monitoring of the network; and centralized wiring for all the copper and fiber-optic links to CIS offices and labs in Smith Hall and other locations. Wireless networks are widely deployed to aid in roaming and conference settings.

The central facility provides access to a number of other specialized facilities in the ECE/CIS lab. They include:

• Inter-Departmental Sun Server with several Terabytes of disk space serving client machines and user file space,
• Inter-Departmental Sun Server with several Terabytes of disk space serving World Wide Web (WWW),
• Inter-Departmental Sun Server with several hundred Gigabytes of redundant disk space serving E-mail,
• Inter-Departmental Sun Servers with 8x CPUs and 32 GB of RAM serving computational needs,
• A high-speed router to the Internet, thru the campus network, to a Gigabit link to the Internet, and OC3 (155Mbps) link to Internet2;
• Graduate labs equipped with PCs for Presentation/Document Processing, and collaboration.

In addition, the Department has several clusters for high performance computation and research on distributed computing. The High Performance Computing Software Lab also makes use of the teaching cluster of 8 2xCPU Linux systems, each with 1GB of RAM connected by 100Mbs and 1000Mbs networks.

Labs

• Bioinformatics Lab (421 Smith Hall)
• Computational Learning Lab (429 Smith Hall)
• Computer Graphics Lab (208 Smith Hall)
• DEGAS Networking Lab (214 Smith Hall)
• Distributed & Meta-Systems Lab (101D Pearson Hall)
• Dynamic Vision Lab (211 Smith Hall)
• LinBox Lab (326 Smith Hall)
• Multi-Agent Systems Lab (447 Smith Hall)
• NLP/AI Lab (77/79 E. Del. Ave)
• Network Management & Optimization Lab (342 Smith Hall)
• Network Security Lab (28 W. Del. Ave)
• Protocol Engineering Lab (28 W. Del. Ave)
• Software Analysis and Compilation Lab (213 Smith Hall)
• Verified Software Lab (101D Pearson Hall)
• VIMS: Video/Image Modeling and Synthesis Lab (212 Smith Hall)
• General Graduate Student Lab (115 Pearson Hall)

* 126 stations are distributed over these labs.

University:

The CIS Department also makes substantial use of University-wide Facilities in its research and instructional programs. Almost all Undergraduate instructional computing is done on University-wide facilities, though the Department also maintains a separate Academic network of Sun systems for specialized instruction. Information on these systems can be found at FAQ-Academic/Research machines. The Department also makes use of some specialized University-wide research computing facilities.

In 2001 the campus-wide network backbone was upgraded to a new backbone utilizing Gigabit Ethernet (1000 megabits per second) and Cisco switches.

The University of Delaware is a member of the Abilene (Internet2) project and has a OC-3 (155 Mbs) connection from Campus to this new nationwide network research vehicle running at OC-48 (2.4 Gbs) and OC-192 (10 Gbs).