This document contains information pertaining only to CS department systems maintained by CRF.
For information about other Columbia computing resources, please refer to the AcIS website at http://www.columbia.edu/acis.
The departmental computing infrastructure consists of a data center for computational, storage and VoIP services, one large student laboratory, featuring 18 Windows machines and 33 Linux towers each with 2 Nehalem processors, 8 cores and 24GB memory; a remote Linux cluster with 17 servers each with 2 Xeon processors and 4GB memory, and a number of computing facilities for individual research labs. The data center houses 14TB of Network Appliance file servers, a compute cluster consisting of a Linux cloud with 32 servers each with 2 Nehalem processors, 8 cores and 24GB memory. This cloud can support approximately 5000 of VMware instances. Additional computing facility includes 8 Intel Linux servers with 8 processors and 16GB memory each and 3 Sun Fire 280R servers, a 3Com VoIP system, and departmental load balanced web cluster with 6 servers and business process servers, an online backup server with 40TB capacity, along with supporting servers that provide print services, LDAP, DHCP, DNS, tapes backup and software distribution to the department. The data center is internally connected via Gigabit Ethernet and accesses the Internet and Internet2 via the campus fiber network. The University provides 802.11b coverage for most of the campus.
Columbia University Information Technology maintains Columbia's commodity Internet connections that include 1 Gb/s via Level 3, 5 Gb/s via Cogent and 100 Mb/s via RCN (for RCN residential cable modem customers). Columbia's research and education network connections include a NYSERNet NYC and statewide regional optical network ("dark fiber"), a 1 Gb/s connection to NYSERNet's IP network and from there to Internet2 and National Lambda Rail (NLR) packet net and 1 Gb/s connection to the US Large Hadron Collider Network (USLHCNET) providing connectivity to CERN.
The research infrastructure includes many Sun, Dell and HP servers and hundreds of workstations from Apple, Dell, HP and other PC manufacturers. The labs for research in image processing, vision, graphics, and robotics contain such specialized equipment as a Data Cube image processor, an Adept1 robot, and Aspex PIPE (an eight-stage parallel, pipelined, low-level image processor), Unimate Puma 500 and IBM robotic arms, a Utah-MIT dextrous hand, high performance 3-D graphics workstations, 3-D position/orientation trackers, see-through headworn displays, and a wall-sized stereo display.
CRF facilities are partially supported by the Secure Cyber Operations and Parallelization Studies (SCOPS) instrumentation grant from AFOSR (Contract #: FA 99500910389).
The research facilities are staffed by professional systems engineers who are responsible for operating system and network support, miscellaneous hardware and software maintenance, and troubleshooting. These staff members allow individual researchers to avoid spending time on hardware and software problems.
The Department of Computer Science charges each research personnel a prorated fee of $2,400 per year for use of the computing facilities in the department. This includes use of all servers, cluster computers, storage, backups, network connections, technical consulting and troubleshooting. The fee is expected to increase to $2,600 per person on July 1, 2014. All faculty, GRA's and post-doctoral researchers are charged this fee. The computer user fee funds the operation and equipment of the departmental computing infrastructure, and is charged in accordance with Columbia University Controller Agreement #100988 from Feb. 24, 2006.