SENS Computing Facilities

Introduction

Computing facilities supported by SENS fall into two basic categories: Laboratories and classrooms, which our community use directly for instruction and research, and the "behind the scenes" facilities that support the other computing resources in our Node, such as our servers and timeshares.

SENS Laboratory and Classroom Facilities

SENS supports many computing laboratory and classroom facilities around campus. In the following sections are brief descriptions of them; clicking on the link for a lab or classroom will take you to a page that describes that room's configuration in more detail.

In general, the connotation "laboratory" implies a computing facility that is open for use without restriction. The designation "classroom" denotes a facility with scheduled hours and which is used primarily for instruction. Facilities with both nomenclatures are generally used for scheduled instruction purposes during the day, and are open for general-purpose computing at night.

SENS Unix/Linux Workstation Classrooms and Laboratories

SENS maintains four public Unix/Linux classrooms and laboratories:

101 Bell Hall: A cooperative SENS/CIT Sun/Linux laboratory.
211/212 Furnas Hall: A SENS Linux classroom and laboratory.
1018 Furnas Hall: An Engineering SGI classroom and laboratory.
8B Baldy Hall: A Natural Sciences Linux classroom.

SENS Unix/Linux Workstation Departmental Laboratories

SENS maintains three departmental Unix/Linux labs:

340 Bell Hall: A cooperative SENS/CSE Sun classroom and laboratory.
521 Cooke Hall: The LMVA bioinformatics laboratory.
139 Hochstetter Hall: A Geology Linux classroom and laboratory.

SENS PC Departmental Laboratories

SENS maintains seven departmental PC labs:

425 Bell Hall: An Industrial Engineering laboratory.
213/214 Furnas Hall: An Electrical Engineering laboratory.
416/417 Furnas Hall: An Electrical Engineering laboratory.
1019 Furnas Hall: A Mechanical/Chemical Engineering laboratory.
212 Hochstetter Hall: A Biological Sciences (Ecolab) laboratory.
208 Ketter Hall: A Civil Engineering laboratory.
110 Natural Sciences Complex: A Chemistry laboratory.

SENS Macintosh Departmental Laboratories

SENS maintains one departmental Macintosh lab:

218 Cooke Hall: A Biological Sciences laboratory.

Server and Timeshare Facilities

In addition to the computers you see in labs, research facilities, and offices, there are many other computers that work "behind the scenes" to keep everything working together, and providing the resources that make up the UBiquity model. This page describes the machines that make up our Unix server environment, our PC server environment, and our timeshare environments (including the Citrix servers).

Unix Servers

SENS maintains many Unix-based servers, which form the heart of our infrastructure. These servers provide critical network services, email access, web page access, disk sharing, and a multitude of similar functions. Most of our "core" systems are from Sun Microsystems, but we also have servers from SGI and Hewlett Packard to meet the diverse needs of our community.

PC Servers

SENS maintains several PC servers to provide services needed for our extensive Microsoft Windows-based personal computer community. These servers facilitate file sharing, printing services, and remote management of software and the operating system.

Timeshare Servers

SENS maintains several timeshare computing environments, which use the Solaris, Linux, and IRIX operating systems. These systems can be used for batch processing, programs that require more resources than a workstation contains, and services for remote users.

Citrix Servers

SENS maintains a Citrix environment which allows users from many different kinds of computers to run Microsoft Windows applications.

Research Clusters

SENS does not have a general-use cluster at this time, but we hope to offer this resource in the near future.

University at Buffalo - State University of New York

Science & Engineering Node Services (SENS)

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