V. Laboratories and Computing Facilities
A. Computer facilities available for use in computer science programs.Describe the computer facilities available for use in programs in computer science.
1. Describe the computing facilities used for instruction. Indicate the types of software available in each category. Specify any limitations that impact the quality of the educational experience.
Institutional facilities:
There are several open computer labs on campus for student use that have a standard set of software that serves the general student population needs.
Departmental facilities:
The CS department has 7 computer laboratories (approximately 9500 square feet of space) containing 300 Dell computers. Each machine has a 1.3 Gig Pentium IV processor with 256 MEG of RAM, 2 video cards, a DVD/CD drive, and a 256 Meg Zip drive.
The laboratory computers run Windows 2000, UNIX, LINUX, and the special software needed to service the computer science courses.
The labs are attached to a server array containing 8 Pentium III dual processor machines. Each machine has 1 Gig of RAM, and 9 Gig of disk space. The server array shares a 500 Gig SAN disk storage facility.
2. Are there any labs, courses, or policies that require two or more students to share a lab station? No If the answer is yes, please describe the situation(s) involved.
3.Briefly describe the laboratory equipment planning, acquisition, and maintenance processes and their adequacy. Include discussion of these topics for university-wide facilities available to all students (if used by your majors), your own laboratories and equipment (if applicable), and facilities controlled by other departments and/or schools (if used by your majors). Discuss how you assess the adequacy of your laboratory and computing support. Please attach documentation (e. g., inventories, equipment replacement plans, etc.) to this report.
The move into a new building provided the department with excellent laboratory facilities. The Computer Science department leadership works closely with the lab management staff of the department and with the faculty of the department to make sure that the hardware and software needed to support the courses being taught are available in the department�s laboratories. Every student who uses the labs must pay a lab fee every semester. The funds for the new building provided a budget boost to populate the current laboratory facilities. The ongoing budget provided by the student lab fees should enable the department to replace their laboratory equipment every 3 to 4 years. The current facilities are described in part 1 of this section.