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Elon University is committed to providing up-to-date computing resources for all students; students have Ethernet access from residence halls and can easily access the Elon web pages, Blackboard and their dedicated storage.
The Computing Sciences Department on the third floor of the Duke building provides an extremely rich set of hardware and software tools for computer science and computer information systems students. The environment is state of the art with wireless connection to the Internet and provides the resources for an Elon student to graduate with the knowledge and expertise to productively step into any corporation’s or university's computing environment. Computing resources are located in Alamance 315, Duke 303, Duke 304, Duke 305, KBC 313, KBC 354, Mooney 201 and Powell 213.
The department has a dedicated software lab in Duke 305 and a dedicated network lab in Duke 304.
The Carpenter lab in Duke 305 has 12 high-end desktops for exclusive use by Computer Science and Computer Information Systems majors. No classes are taught in this lab, and each major has access 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. This exclusive access provides majors an ideal setting for homework, team projects and experimentation. The desktops are replaced every four years to insure students have access to the latest hardware. During the summer of 2007, twelve of the machines were replaced with Mac Pro Desktops configured with two 2.66 GHz dual core Intel Xeon processors with 2 gigabytes of memory and dual monitors.
To insure students have exposure to the two dominant operating systems in today’s marketplace, each Mac Pro machine can run Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7. These machines all have an X window interface for communicating with any of the 8 dedicated department server machines running Linux. The Linux machines have the full set of gnu compilers and tools.
With the goal of simulating the environment used for client server software development, all twelve Mac Pro desktops have dual 19, 20, or 23 inch flat panel displays. The stations allow use of both screens to double the display space and significantly improve developer productivity. For example, a grid service developer may have client side code on one screen with the related server side code simultaneously available on the other screen.
All machines are connected to the campus network and can access department servers, university servers and an off-site super computer. Students needing access to this lab or accounts on servers should contact Joel Hollingsworth.
The network lab was established in the summer of 2007 to provide students with a flexible and accessible environment for configuring and experimenting with clusters of machines with a variety of operating systems and network topologies. The room has 16 Del desktops purchased in the summer of 2008 with 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors with 2 gigabytes of memory and 17” monitors.
Duke 306 has five dedicated rack mounted blade servers new as of the summer of 2006 and a grid node of 8 machines purchased in the summer of 2008. The five server blades each have 3.2 GHz Xeon processors with 2 gigabytes of memory and 150 Gigabytes of storage. The grid node has 8 clustered Del desktops purchased in the summer of 2008 with 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors with 2 gigabytes of memory and are running Fedora Linux.
Three of the five department blade servers are Windows 2008 servers. They provide access to three major databases, Oracle 11g, MySQL 5.1 and SQL Server 2008. They also provide web application server functionality to support classes in web development. The application servers currently support SharePoint 2010, Apache, ColdFusion and IIS. The other two department blade servers are dedicated Linux servers to support classes in systems programming and mobile computing.
The majority of Computer Science and Information Systems classes are taught in the laboratory classrooms located in Alamance 315, Duke 303, KBC 313, KBC 354, Mooney 201 and Lindner 202. These rooms provide an ideal environment to combine lecture with hands-on development. The class size is limited to a maximum of 30 students, and each student has individual access to a computer. These machines are replaced every four years. When classes are not in session, these labs are available for student use.
The machines in the above classroom laboratories all have an identical, rich assortment of over 40 software packages that are widely used in industry. These packages are updated twice yearly, and Elon prides itself on always having the most recent releases used in industry. Currently installed software includes:
The department is a member of the MSDN academic alliance, and students enrolled in a course can get free access to the Microsoft products used in that course.