From the earliest days in the history of automatic computation, the department has been one of a small number of university groups to design complete systems of hardware as well as software. The ORDVAC computer, built in DCL and subsequently shipped to the Aberdeen Ballistic Research Laboratories, was the first working bit-parallel shared program computer. ILLIAC I was completed following a similar design shortly thereafter and was in operation from 1952 until 1962. It was one of the first electronic computers built and owned entirely by an educational institution. Following ILLIAC I, the department was involved in the design and construction of ILLIACs II, III, IV, and Cedar. Today, the department offers a broad program in computer science, from computer architecture and software systems design through scientific and high-performance computing. A new building for the department was completed in 1990. An extensive network of computing facilities and support equipment is available within the department as well as campuswide for use in faculty and graduate student research.
Departmental facilities are organized around a central network with a number of subnets serving the various research groups. The central facilities consist of multiple servers that provide mail, ftp, software distribution, computation, and NFS file services to over 400 workstations. Two high-capacity laser printers, a color printer, a film recorder, a color plotter, and several workstations are provided for general use. The distributed part of the system comprises equipment appropriate to a given research group's needs. There are Sun, Silicon Graphics, Apple, HP, and Intel PC workstations in this part of the facility, as well as Silicon Graphics and Intel parallel systems and ATM switches associated with several larger research projects. More than 100 UNIX and PC workstations are available to students in departmental instructional laboratories. In addition, the campus Computing and Communications Services Organization (CCSO) operates more than 80 workstations to support introductory computing instruction.
The National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) supercomputers are a 64-processor SGI Power Challenge Array, and a 64-processor Convex/HP Exemplar, and a 128-processor Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 system along with a number of other large-scale systems. The department main tains close ties with NCSA, where grand challenge computational science problems are encountered.