Computing Resources

Robotics Lab: The Abilene Robotics Lab has Nao humanoid robots (from Aldebaran Robots), which is a two-legged computing platform with on-board sensing (color cameras, range finders) and actuation (22 degrees of freedom). The Naos will be used to create a team of robots playing soccer on an indoor soccer field. TTU at Abilene plans to field a joint team with The University of Texas at the International RoboCup competitions in the summer. In addition, the lab has larger wheeled robot platforms for outdoor navigation, and smaller wheeled robot platformswith on-board sensing obtained from the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE) to teach basic computer science to undergraduates and local high-school students. Furthermore, the lab has the required computational facilities in form of linux workstations.

High Performace Computing: TTU at Abilene has a 25 node cluster known as Sponge. Each node has a dual CPU core and 2GB of RAM. Sponge has 2TB RAID 5 storage and a tape library. The cluster runs Debian Linux with the Debian Cluster Components (DCC) and is configured as a Beowulf cluster. Sponge's filesystem is exported to all of the machines on our network, allowing users to access their data from any machine on our network.

For tightly coupled multi-threaded applications, we have a Sun Fire T1000 machine with the UltraSPARC T2 processor. This processor supports 32 concurrent hardware threads (equivalent to eight quad-core Intel Processors). We also have a Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 system which supports eight concurrent hardware threads, and may be slightly faster for floating point applications.

In addition, faculty and students have access to the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) in Lubbock, http://www.hpcc.ttu.edu/ which houses a Dell cluster of 64 dual 3.2 GHz Xeons and 64 2.33 GHz dual quad-core Xeons. The HPCC grid has 12TB of shared storage.

Computer Labs: TTU at Abilene Computer Lab has 5 Sun UltraSparc 64 bit workstations running Solaris. The Sun user home directories are mounted on the Sponge RAID allowing students to develop code on any workstation and port it to run on sponge. TTU at Abilene also has three multi-processor Apple Macintosh and Dell machines running Mac OS X and Linux. User home directories on Sponge can also be accessed from these machines. There are a few older Windows and Linux workstations available.

The Computer Science Department in Lubbock maintains two instructional laboratories with Pentium PCs and eMac G4. These laboratories support special applications required for Computer Science courses not available elsewhere on TTU campus. Computer Science also has a UNIX laboratory with “Sunblade 100” machines. Computer Science has various research laboratories ranging from personal computers, to a variety of Sun Solaris Unix workstations, to a variety of Apple workstations. Computer Science maintains two server labs. One of the server lab is used for department production and it consist of Sun V880 server providing variety of services like web service, NFS etc, and more than 5.5TB of storage devices and tape backup devices. It also consists of Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers and Mac servers. The other server lab is the research server lab, which consists of variety of IBM, Dell, Apple, and Sun servers.

Network: TTU at Abilene is served by a 45MB DS3 local loop from the TTU Health Science Center School of Pharmacy building at 1718 Pine in Abilene. The Abilene School of Pharmacy has a 145MB OC3 pipe directly to the Lubbock campus leased through AT&T. There is another OC3 local loop which transports packets between Lubbock Health Science Center and University campuses. The Abilene connection terminates into the main router in Lubbock allowing direct switching between the Internet II OC12 655MB backbone or buildings on the Lubbock Campus. The TTU at Abilene "Abilene Grant" building has more than 120 wired network port. Most ports are 10/100 switch and there are 24 1GB ports available. WI-FI 802.11b/g wireless networking covers 99% of the AbileneTeaching Site.

Interactive Teaching Resources: The Abilene Teaching Site uses Interactive Television (ITV - sometimes called IVC or interactive video conferencing) to send and receive classes with the Lubbock Campus. We receive classes for the Computer Science and Education Departments and we have live classes originating in Abilene and Lubbock. Our classrooms use PolyCom H.323 videoconferencing equipment. Each ITV room has plasma TVs to show professors and projectors to show computer and document camera presentations. The classrooms use push to talk microphones for student interaction. There are additional ITV resources available in two conference rooms for meetings and conferences. The Abilene Teaching Site has its own Classroom support for recording classes and maintaining interactive video equipment.