Overview of Computing Facilities
The department is dedicated to providing a wide range of advanced high-quality computing facilities for use by computer science faculty and students. The number of users of these facilities is about 3,800. The facilities are operated by a technical staff who are not only responsible for the installation and maintenance of the systems, but who also assist faculty and students in the use and development of software systems for research projects.
Our workstation network consists of more than 500 PCs (mostly Pentium III, most of them with flat TFT monitors) running Linux. Windows 2000 can be used as an alternative to Linux. More than 100 of the workstations are mobile laptops that can join and leave the network dynamically.
The general computing facilities include a farm of servers: general-purpose computers, a computing cluster, file servers and other functionally dedicated servers (mail, WWW , FTP etc.), and servers for different user groups. Linux is used almost entirely as the operating system for the servers. The centralised file servers utilise RAID technology and currently offer over 1.5 Tbytes storage space. Together, these systems support a wide variety of services, languages and software tools including electronic mail and news, graphics and visualisation tools, several typesetting systems, and relational database systems. Special attention has been paid to security and reliability.
Networking is based on switched 100 Mbit/ s Ethernet with an optical backbone. The mobile laptops can also utilise a departmental IEEE 802.11b type radio network which currently has 15 base stations. In the Linux (and UNIX) environment NFS is used to share common resources. On the Windows side Samba (a Linux-hosted Lan Manager Server) is utilized. The workstations are used as tools for software development, in research and on all levels of teaching.
The network of the department is connected through a firewall to the university backbone network, giving access to general-purpose UNIX computers at the University IT Department as well as to the FUNET wide area network that links Finnish universities and research establishments. The IT Department also offers a large modem and ISDN pool for remote access.
In addition, the department has access to a number of supercomputing facilities at the Center for Scientific Computing .
The national FUNET network is further connected to the Nordic University Network, Nordunet , with a 5 Gbit/s connection. The Nordunet has a 2.5 Gbit/s connection capacity to the United States as well as many high-capacity connections to the European network infrastructure.