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 a farm of servers (general purpose computers, file servers, and dedicated servers for mail, WWW, FTP, etc.) and a network of workstations and PC microcomputers. The departmental general purpose computers are an Alpha based Citum Power System (a repackaged Aspen server), a SPARCserver 670MP and a SPARCserver 10. (The SPARCservers will soon be replaced with a more powerful server.) The main file servers are Pentium based systems running Linux and utilizing RAID technology. The total disk space is currently well over 100 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. Special attention has been placed on security and reliability.
The workstation network consists of about 10 SPARCstations and about 280 PCs (mostly Pentiums with high resolution monitors) running Linux. Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or Windows NT can be used as an alternative for Linux. About 30 of the Linux workstations are mobile laptops which can join and leave the network dynamically. Networking is based on an ATM backbone with Ethernet edge devices. The department has six ATM-switches installed. The mobile laptops can also utilize a departmental 1 Mbit/s radio network which currently has 7 base stations. On the UNIX side (Linux, SunOS/Solaris), NFS is used to share common resources. On the Windows side, Samba (a UNIX hosted Lan Manager Server) is used. 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 the Oracle and Ingres database management systems, the SAS statistical analysis package, the NAG numerical library, and Pascal, Ada, and Prolog programming environments.
In addition, the department has access to a Cray C94, a Cray T3E, two SGI Power Challenge/Onyx, a Digital AlphaServer 8400, 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 Mbit/s line. The Nordunet has also a 79 Mbit/s terrestrial connection to NAP Pennsauken in the United States as well as many connections to the European network infrastructure. This means that the department is very well connected to the Internet.