Computer Facilities

All faculty and graduate students are provided with an account on the university mainframe computer. This account gives them access to electronic mail facilities, Internet, statistical software packages like SAS, scientific graphics, with all common computer language compilers and the computer algebra system Maple. Wireless accessibility is available throughout the department.

A computer lab exclusive to faculty, Honours projects students, and future graduate students has 6 computer desks with 2 P4, 2 Pentium III, 1 Pentium II, 1 Mac G4, one X-terminal and one SGI-station. Students will have an account on the departmental server (a dual processor Pentium 4, 1.7GHz with 1 GB of RAM and 80GB hard disk, or an AMD64 Athlon PC with 1 GB RAM and 250 GB hard disk). This computer has computer algebra systems Maple and REDUCE and is well suited for computer algebra applications.

A Beowulf computer cluster of currently 24 nodes consisting of 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 machines will be upgraded this term to 42 Pentium 4 machines with 3GHz. This cluster is the only one in Canada on which parallel computer algebra is installed and actively used. Students can get an account on this cluster.

This year Brock University has become a member of the Ontario High Performance Computing consortium SHARCNET. By that Brock has access to 3 large computer clusters (each > 120 nodes in UWO, McMaster, Guelph) and all the support that comes with it. A fast 1 GHz connection is planned. Students with a research project requiring parallel computation could have an account on these clusters.