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Computer Science
M. Snir, Head; M. D. Mickunas, Associate Head

3270 Digital Computer Laboratory, 1304 W. Springfield Ave., MC-258, Urbana, IL 61801-2987
217-333-4428 • http://www.cs.uiuc.edu

The Department of Computer Science is one of the largest and oldest of its kind in the country. Founded in 1949, the department, housed in the Digital Computer Laboratory (DCL), continues a long tradition as one of the world's leaders in computer research.

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. 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 virtual subnets serving the various research groups.

•Central facilities consist of multiple servers that provide mail, ftp, software distribution, computation, and NFS file services to more than 400 workstations.

•The distributed part of the system comprises equipment appropriate to a given research group's needs, including Sun, Silicon Graphics, HP, and Intel systems.

•More than 200 UNIX and PC workstations are available to students in departmental instructional laboratories.

•The College of Engineering operates more than 80 workstations to support introductory computing instruction.

•In collaboration with the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets, the department also operates a large Intel PC cluster for parallel computing research.

The National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) supercomputers are a Convex/HP Exemplar and a Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 system along with a number of other large-scale systems. The department maintains a strategic collaborative relationship with NCSA, where grand challenge computational science problems are explored.