The department offers a wide range of services to support computing activities of the academic staff and students. The policy is to provide access to advanced hardware and software systems.
The computing facilities include three general purpose computers, file servers, a farm of dedicated servers (e.g. for mail, WWW and FTP) and a network of workstations and microcomputers. The departmental general purpose computers are an Alpha based Citum Power System (a repackaged Aspen server), a SPARCserver 670MP and a SPARCserver 10. Some SPARCservers are used as file servers but the main file server is a Pentium based system running Linux and utilizing RAID technology. The total disk space is currently approximately 40 Gbytes. All the Alpha and Pentium based machines use Linux, but the SPARC computers run SunOS/Solaris. Together these systems support a wide variety of services, languages and software tools including electronic mail and news, graphics and visualization tools, several typesetting systems, and relational database systems.
The workstation network consists of about 40 SPARCstations and about 140 PCs (mostly Pentiums with high resolution monitor) running Linux. MS-Windows can be used as an alternative for Linux. About 20 of the Linux workstations are mobile laptops which can join and leave the network dynamically. The department also has about 70 other PCs and a number of X-terminals. Networking is based on Ethernet and ATM. CDDI (Copper Distributed Data Interface) technology is currently being phased out. On the UNIX side (Linux, SunOS/Solaris) NFS is used to share common resources. On the MS-Windows side Samba (a UNIX hosted Lan Manager Server) is used. Both Sun OpenWindows and MIT X11R6 with different window managers are in active use. The workstations are used as tools for software development, in research and all levels of teaching.
The network of the department is connected to the university backbone network, giving access to computers at the University Computing Centre as well as to the FUNET wide area network that links Finnish universities and research establishments. The computers operated by the Computing Centre include SPARC (Sun, Solbourne, Axil), Digital Alpha and HP machines running under UNIX. Services provided by the Computing Centre include Oracle and Ingres database management systems, SAS statistical analysis package, NAG numerical library, and Pascal, Ada, and Prolog programming environments.
In addition, the department has access to Cray C94, Cray T3E, two SGI Power Challenge, IBM SP2/24, and other supercomputers at the Center for Scientific Computing.
The national FUNET network is further connected to the Nordic University Network, Nordunet with a dedicated G.703(E3) 34 Mbps line. The Nordunet has also a 34 Mbps terrestrial connection to NAP Pennsauken in the United States as well as many connections to the European infrastructure. This means that the department is very well connected to the Internet.