The faculty, researchers, and students within the Department of Computer Science have access to a wide variety of computing resources, ranging from laptops, conventional PC's, and scientific workstations, to high-powered compute-servers and workstation clusters used as parallel computers. All of the computer systems are interconnected by an Ethernet local network, which is in turn connected to the Internet via fiber optic technology to the campus backbone. The Department's network has recently been upgraded to 10 MBit switched Ethernet, with the capacity to expand to 100 MBit on demand.
Almost every member of the department, including advanced graduate students, is equipped with a workstation or advanced-technology PC, all running some variant of the Unix or NT operating system. In addition, there is a computing laboratory for computer science undergraduate and graduate students, containing a total of 37 color/multimedia workstations.
Yale University has recently received a grant from Intel that is allowing the Computer Science Department to upgrade its computing base to 400 MHz Pentium-II PC's with 128 MBytes of memory each. The student computing facility will use these machines.
In addition, individual research groups have specialized equipment for robotics, music composition, and other research areas. Students in computer science, both graduate and undergraduate, have essentially unlimited access to all these facilities. They play a vital role in keeping them up-to-date and using them to contribute to our understanding of theoretical and experimental issues in computer science.
The Department's computing resources are managed by our own staff, who work closely with the Yale office of Information and Technology Services. A faculty committee sets the policy followed by the staff.