The Department is housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Building. The Department has a teaching computer lab and a research computer lab. Recently, the Department has installed in the research lab three Intel-based Linux workstations dedicated to large scale numerical computing and statistical simulation. It has also received a SCREMS grant from the National Science Foundation with matching support from the College and the University. With the funding, the Department has replaced all the PCs in the research lab with 15 new Dell OptiPlex double dual-cores PCs with Window XP operating systems. Within the next year, the Department will also use the funding to purchase a Linux based computer cluster with 30 or more computing nodes, each with double quad-cores. With these changes, the computing facilities of the Department that are accessible to the graduate students, the visiting scholars, and the faculty members are operated by Window XP or Linux operating systems.
The Department has transferred all its email, web and file sharing services to an Intel-based Linux server named MERLOT, which is a Dell PowerEdge 2550 rack mounted server with dual 3 GHz Xeon processors and a RAID disk array.
 
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A large software base is now available in either the PCs or the Linux workstations in both labs, which includes SAS, S-Plus, SPSS, GLIM, MINITAB, Mathematica, Maple, IMSL (Fortran and C), R, WinBUGS, as well as other packages and languages.
The Department's computers are managed and maintained by four lab managers: one Linux quarter time operations manager (Tim Ruggerieri), one PC quarter time operations manager from the office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, one student Linux cluster manager, and one student Webmaster. The computer management team maintains, installs, and upgrades the operating systems and software, and provides the service of weekly tape-backing up as well as daily trouble-shooting of system problems.
 
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University of Connecticut |