The department is dedicated to providing a wide range of advanced high-quality computing facilities for use by computer science faculty and students. 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 modern PCs running Linux. We are using the department's own Ubuntu-based Cubbli Linux distribution and Windows 7 as our primary operating systems. Our workstations are mostly less than 3 years old. More than 150 of the workstations are mobile laptops, which have a wireless connection to the department's network. We also have a remotely accessible interactive Windows 7 server, which can be accessed from Linux workstations and laptops. There are also some remotely accessible interactive Linux servers.
For the last 3 years new students have also received a netbook for their personal use. Currently 400 of these netbooks are in active use.
The general computing facilities include a farm of servers: general-purpose computers, 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. Most of the servers are now virtualized under a VMware hypervisor. There are currently about 50 virtual servers. Storage is distributed to servers and virtual hosts through a Storage Area Network (SAN). Workstations and servers use NFS and Samba network protocols to access home and group directories from a centralized file server, which has more than 20 terabytes of storage allocated to personal and group directories from the SAN. Backups are handled by an HP tape library, which has 8 LTO-4 tape drives and 650 tape slots.
The department also has a computer cluster named Ukko. Ukko has 240 Dell Poweredge M610 nodes, which are connected by multiple 10Gbit/s network interfaces.
The department's network is mostly 1Gbit/s switched ethernet with an optical backbone. The network of the department is connected through a firewall to the university's backbone network and the university's network is connected to the FUNET wide area network that links Finnish universities and research establishments. The university's IT Department also offers a wireless network, which in Exactum can be used to directly access the department's own network.
In addition, the department has access to a number of supercomputing facilities at the Center for Scientific Computing .