Facilities, Equipment, and Laboratory Resources

User Studies Lab

The Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Newell Simon Hall shares the physical and computing environment of the School of Computer Science. The School is the largest academic organization at CMU devoted to the study of computers. Its five degree-granting departments (the HCII, the Computer Science Department, Robotics Institute, Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, and Language Technologies Institute) have over 200 faculty, 300 graduate students, and a 200-person professional technical staff. Two new units are the Entertainment Technology Center (1998), and the International Software Research Institute (1999). SCS also collaborates with other centers at CMU, including the Software Engineering Institute, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), the Information Networking Institute, and the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems.

The facilities available to students and researchers at the HCII include a heterogeneous distributed computing environment, experimental computers, a wide variety of networked machines, and the User Studies Lab .

Heterogeneous Distributed Computing

The SCS environment provides numerous and diverse computers for faculty and graduate-student use--more than 3000 machines. All have transparent access to the Andrew File System, a multi-terabyte, shared file space, and to one another through the Network File System protocol. SCS maintains several terabytes of secondary storage. Beyond these resources, the University provides various independent facilities for general use. Computationally intensive applications can also use PSC computers, including Cray T3E, C90-16/512, and J90 supercomputers.

Experimental Systems

SCS has a reputation for developing innovative computers, devices, networks, and systems that benefit diverse applications. Current large-scale, experimental efforts include the Darwin “application-aware” networking project and the NASD project on storage interfaces with direct device/client communication.

Networking

Carnegie Mellon operates a fully-interconnected, multimedia, multiprotocol campus network. The system incorporates state-of-the-art commercial technology and spans over 100 segments in a “collapsed backbone” infrastructure that enables mutual access among all campus systems, including the PSC supercomputers. The University currently provides 2Mb/s wireless data communication campus-wide.

Externally, SCS connects directly to the Internet, through OC-3 (155 Mbit/s) links, the NSF-sponsored vBNS (OC12) network, and the Internet-2 Abilene network. Carnegie Mellon is also actively engaged in the very high bandwidth research NGI initiatives.

For general SCS operating questions, go to http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~admin/