Overview

RPI, in collaboration with IBM and the State of New York, is building a computing center with computational power in the top ten in the world, and with more power than any university-based computing center in the world. As its name suggests, the $100M Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) will be used to study nano-scale phenomena and devices through multi-scale, multi-physics simulation techniques. However, it will also be available to faculty and students of the Computer Science Department who are engaged in research that requires a high-performance computing system. Application areas include bioinformatics, social network modeling, data mining, and robot design and motion planning.

With the help of generous gifts from alumni, the Computer Science Department has recently completed the Landgraf Center for Computer Vision, Graphics, and Robotics. The Center provides over 6000 square feet of lab, office, meeting, and presentation space for faculty, students, and staff. Theoretical and applied research carried out in the Center is supported by its experimental facilities including a light-duty machine shop, a Barrett Whole-Arm Manipulator with integral Barrett Hand, an Adept industrial robot arm, many cameras with image processing systems, and a small fleet of Garcia and RPI-designed Ratbot mobile robots.

All Rensselaer students have access to the Rensselaer Computing System, a network of Unix and Windows NT workstations. In addition, the Computer Science Department has its own networks and laboratories, allowing CS students the opportunity to work on some of the most advanced scientific computing equipment available. These include special-purpose computers with unique architectures, advanced function workstations, and a variety of general-purpose computers. The laboratory equipment includes the following:

A Sun Microsystems Enterprise 3500, one of the department's core fileservers, with gigabit Ethernet and a half-terabyte RAID array.
A Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 computer running IRIX 6.5.8. This computer has 12 nodes and 2 GB of RAM and is used for parallel computing research and simulations.
20 Sun Microsystems Ultra 10 workstations each with 256MB RAM and Elite3D graphics cards, available in the public computer science lab.

As often as possible, all of the Department's Sun workstations run the Solaris 9 operating system. All of the Department's Sun workstations are configured for MPI, making the 20 machines in public labs as well as the other computers in student offices a large distributed parallel computer.

The Department's network provides 100Mbit full-duplex Ethernet to the desktop from a gigabit Ethernet backbone.

All of this equipment is on a Class B Internet network which is connected to the Rensselaer Class B network. This in turn connects to the worldwide Internet, giving all students access to an astonishing variety of information resources.

There is a wide variety of computing equipment available in other laboratories as well, and students who need specialized hardware or software for their research can get accounts on whatever systems are appropriate. There is also a 32-node IBM SP2 on campus to satisfy larger parallel computing needs.