Our School

Computing Facilities

The School has well-equipped computer laboratories for coursework teaching and student projects, including a number of specialist laboratories. In total there exists a network of close to 500 computers for teaching, research and administration. These include :

  • 14 general purpose teaching laboratories containing 278 computers. These laboratory computers can also be used after hours as compute farms for simulations and other large CPU-intensive projects.
  • 1 specialised networks teaching and project lab containing 33 computers and switching infrastructure and which can be configured in a number of networking layouts.
  • 1 specialised lab containing 20 computers for teaching human-computer interfaces.
  • 1 thesis lab containing 20 computers for fourth-year students to spend extended time on software projects.
  • 1 virtual crypto lab containing multiple computers and switching infrastructure which can be configured in a number of way and is used to teach cryptography and security.
  • 1 virtual lab containing 20 computers and a private high-speed network used for teaching parallel and distributed processing.
  • Multiple login servers which students and staff can access from anywhere on the internet (including home) and which have all the laboratory  software.

The School is committed to regular upgrades of its facilities, and invests over $1million per year on equipment replacement.

The specialist teaching laboratories are:
The Microprocessor Projects Laboratory has three high performance PCs for software development and CAD, and 6PCs which can act as hosts for a variety of other equipment (e.g. transputer boards, multimedia equipment, communications, and robotics interfaces). This lab is equipped with a network of 30 MC68008-based laboratory computers and an M69030-based server, interconnected in a robust local area network.

The Advanced Systems Teaching Laboratory comprises of 16 Unix hosts connected via a network whose topology and outside connectivity can be controlled by a dedicated switch/router. Each host is connected to a U4600, a MIPS R4700-based 64-bit computer. The systems were designed and built within the School and run a locally developed micro-kernel based operating system. A kernel development environment runs on the Unix hosts. The laboratory is used to teach Advanced Operating Systems, Advanced Networks and Real-time Systems.

The Human Computer Interaction Laboratory is equipped with 20 high-powered Macintosh workstations and is used to teach aspects of interface design

There are a number of special research facilities:

The Network Research Laboratory is equipped with state of the art commercial ATM Switches, High Speed Routers, Ethernet Switches and several experimental FreeBSD/Linux based routers and commercial test equipment. It is used for research in the areas of Quality of Service Management in the Internet: Differentiated Services Network, Multimedia transmission in the Internet, Pricing and Billing of Services in the Internet, Web performance management and mobile/wireless protocols.

The Distributed Operating Systems Laboratory features a number of U4600's, MIPS-based SGI workstations and single- and multiprocessor Alpha machines as well as a number of locally-developed StongARM-based wearable computers called PLEB. The facility is used for research in Microkernels and microkernel-based systems, operating systems for 64-bit architectures, operating system support for distributed and ubiquitous computing and scalable operating systems for symmetric multiprocessor architectures.

The Robotics Laboratory has a growing collection of robots to support research and student projects in robotics. The laboratory currently has a number of Sony Pets (quadruped robots built by Sony Corp), Pioneers (wheeled robots with video, sonar, laser range finders and wireless ethernet running Linux), CURI (wheeled robot with two cameras running Linux), Fander (wheeled robot with sonar and bump sensors), Stumpy (a six-legged walking robot for research on reinforcement learning), the SCORBOT mechanical arm, etc.

The Visual Information Processing Laboratory contains a number of high-performance SGI workstations for image processing and indexing research.

The PCB Prototyping Facility supports the fabrication of printed circuit boards with up to six layers for a number of research activities.

The Human Computer Interaction Facility supports human-computer-interaction as well as behavioural studies in a visually and acoustically controlled environment.

An alternative fibre-based high-speed network links the School's research and teaching facilities, which is used for networking, distributed systems research as well as for experiments in alternative teaching methods

 

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