Computational Facilities at UMBC
The University of Maryland Baltimore County maintains a modern
research and educational computing environment consisting of a large
number of servers, workstations, and personal computers. These
machines are connected to the UMBC campus network, which provides
access to a variety of other computing resources and connections to
the Internet and BITNET.
Virtually all of the resources described below are located in the new
Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) building which was opened in
the Fall of 1992. This building houses the Engineering departments,
the Computer Science Department, the Center for Telecommunications
Research, the Imaging Research Center, Academic Computing Services,
and all of the campus-wide computer laboratories. The proximity of
all of these groups and their resources has significant technical as
well as social advantages. The major compute-servers and file-servers
for all of these groups are connected by a high-speed fiber FDDI
network and the degree of technical sharing among the groups is very
high. More importantly, the result is a well integrated and open
computational environment which enhances the interdisciplinary nature
of this proposed program in computational science and engineering.
The new ECS building also has a modern lecture hall, outfitted with a
high resolution projection video system which can be used to project
the output of a wide range of computers.
Campus-wide Facilities
The general computational facilities for education and research are
operated by Academic Computing Services. These include time-shared
machines (two large Vaxes, two large SGI Crimsons and an SGI
Challenge, and a number of DEC servers), a 16 node symmetric
multiprocessing machine and a large number of workstations and
personal computers.
Several new laboratories have been opened during the last year which
provide over 200 SGI Unix workstations for general educational use.
These workstations feature the complete line of Indigo graphics,
including entry level (8bit),o Elan (24bit accelerated), and new Indy
multimedia workstations. The workstations are arranged in a number of
laboratory groups which can be utilized for hands on teaching.
We have also just installed a new 16-node SGI Challenge. This machine
is a symmetric multiprocessing system with sixteen R4000 processors
and one gigabyte of shared memory. During the summer of 1994, these
processors will be upgraded to use the R4400 chips which will result
in a system with a peak performance of over one gigaflop.
Other high-performance machines in the ECS building include a Cray
Y-EL and a dual processor SGI Onyx Reality Engine.
In addition to a strong campus-wide hardware base, UMBC has a site
license for a number of relevant software systems, including: Maple,
Matlab, Sas, S-Plus, SGI Explorer, SGI Inventor and SGI Showcase. We
also have a partial site license for a number of high-end
visualization tools including Wavefront and Alias.
Computer Science Department
The Computer Science Departmental research facilities are focused in
offices and four laboratories and consist of approximately 35 color
SGI Unix workstation (Indigo, Indy and Indigo2 Extreme), 10 SPARC 10
Color Unix workstations, 6 color DEC Unix workstations, and 25
Monochrome SUN Unix Workstations. The Department maintains three
large compute servers: a SGI Crimson with 192M or memory, and two Sun
SPARCs with 128M of memory. The Department also maintains a number of
Macintoshes and 486 PCs.
Center for Telecommunications Research
UMBC has recently established the Center for Telecommunications
Research (CTR) which conducts research on high speed networking and
telecommunications. It is in the process of setting up a gigbit
testbed to support research in distributed medical applications (e.g.
Radiology). This testbed will consist of two gigabit token rings
using the IBM ORBIT networking technology, one at the UMBC campus and
one in the medical school located some five miles away at the
University of Maryland at Baltimore (UMAB) campus. These two token
rings will be connected by a high-speed fiber link and eventually to
the Aurora gigabit network. This special facility will provide a
unique setting in which to develop new networking protocols and
technologies needed to support distributed, network-based, multi-media
applications.
Maryland Center for Advanced Information Technology
The Maryland Center for Advanced Information Technology (MCAIT) is research
center which performs research and development in emerging information
technologies. The center is focused on integrating database,
knowledge-base and information retrieval technologies; distributed
heterogeneous information systems; very high-performance information
systems; multi-agent systems; and intelligent user interfaces for
information systems. It supports ongoing applications in such areas
as electronic commerce, digital libraries and personal information
systems.
MCAIT is attached to the Computer Science Department at the University
of Maryland Baltimore County but has the active participation of
faculty, research staff and students in a number of Departments within
the University of Maryland System. It currently receives support from
research grants and contracts from ARPA, NSA, NASA, AFOSR and NSF.
Imaging Research Center
The Imaging Research Center (IRC) has both a research and a service
component. The IRC has a number of affiliated faculty, staff and
students drawn primarily from the departments of Visual Arts and
Computer Science, who conduct research in computer graphics,
visualization, digital imaging and multi-media technology. The IRC
also has a dedicated staff which provide the campus with high-quality
technical graphics services. The Center maintains two SGI Iris
Crimson workstations with high performance VGXT graphics, an SGI Onyx
Reality Engine, and a variety of workstations and PCs. Video I/O is
provided via two video frame buffers (VideoLab and Avinzar) driving an
automated network of video devices, including SVHS, 8mm and video
disk. The Center also offers several film recorders, scanners and
print devices, and high quality dye sublimation printers.
UMIACS
The Computer Science Department is affiliated with the University of
Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Science which has a 32 node
CM-5 computer. This machine is used to support the research and
teaching needs of the Department.
