Alfred W. Fielding Computer Aided Design Laboratory

The Alfred W. Fielding (AWF) Computer-Aided Design Laboratory serves undergraduate, graduate students and for both in-class and out-of-class instruction. The AWF Laboratory also serves as the focus of Departmental computer support, i.e., as home for such staff as are employed to help with Departmental computer service, both hardware and software. At present, one graduate student is employed as a Departmental computer resource; the number of staff has been as high as several part-time individuals within the last year.

The laboratory's facilities are used in several classes including ME 345, Modeling and Simulation, and ME 554, Introduction to Computer Aided Design. All students requiring access may use the computers and software as well as file-server storage space in this laboratory.

The laboratory consists of 20 Windows XP workstations, a Windows 2000 server cluster for managing accounts and file space and a Linux™ cluster and several student laptops (as necessary). The Windows 2000 server cluster provides user authentication, file space and license authentication facilities.

A Linux™ cluster running OpenMosix provides a platform for parallel programming. The cluster has four dedicated compute nodes and the possibility of temporarily adding several workstations from the lab to increase the number of nodes to eight or sixteen. This system is accessible via secure shell interface to the users from the laboratory and outside.

The AWF laboratory currently has more than 325 users in its active authentication directory and serves several hundreds of logins each week. The laboratory is reserved for in-class instruction of three classes ME 554, ME 635 and ME 345 for a total of 7 hours per week during Spring 2003 semester.

Hardware
The laboratory has two black and white printers and one color printer.

The hardware of a typical laboratory workstation (20 such stations are available) is as follows: