Equipment

The Department maintains a network of Unix/Linux/BSD and Windows based systems which are available for use by senior and graduate students. First year computing facilities are provided by the Science Faculty. The value of the current senior/graduate equipment base exceeds R2M. The available equipment includes:

Servers

17 Machines running a variety of operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, WindowsNT, Windows2000, Windows2003) that provide Web, email, domain, file, print, research and other services to the department as a whole.

Workstations

In excess of 200 workstations comprising of Linux and Windows operating systems, including Network Computers with simultaneous Linux and Windows operating systems on the desktop, notebook computers and high-end Intel XEON and AMD based systems.

Research Equipment

High performance clusters, servers, VR hardware and mobile devices, in particular research groups.

Printers/Scanners/cameras/projectors

6 network laser printers, and a range of digital cameras, scanners, etc..

Science First Year Laboratory

The Department is the major user of 120 Windows PCs in the faculty laboratory (with an additional ~200 machines available on demand).

The current undergraduate student-to-machine ratio is about 4.5:1.

Programs

The Department of Computer Science is a paid-up subscriber to the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance program. The program allows the department and registered Computer Science students easy access to software from Microsoft.

Free and Open Source Software

The Department makes extensive use of open source software, which is available at no cost, primarily under the GPL and BSD licenses. The software is provided by the FreeBSD Project, the OpenBSD Project, Ubuntu Linux and a multitude of private individuals and other vendors. The types of software employed range from operating systems, to network infrastructure services, to word processing and typesetting suites.