The faculty, researchers, and students within the Department of Computer Science have available to them a variety of computing resources, ranging from conventional PC's and scientific workstations to high-powered compute-servers and workstation clusters used as parallel computers. All of the computer systems are interconnected by an Ethernet local area network, which is in turn connected to the Internet via fiber optic technology to the campus backbone.
Almost every member of the department, including advanced graduate students, is equipped with a personal scientific workstation, all running some variant of the Unix, Mach, or NT operating systems.
In addition, there is an educational computing laboratory for undergraduates and first-year graduates, containing a total of 37 IBM PowerSeries color/multimedia workstations.
All of the desktop machines are supported by two SUN Ultra file servers, a high end IBM file server, a multitude of high-resolution (including color) printers, two document scanners, extensive tape backup facilities, and a professional computing facility staff that is responsive to users' needs.
Students in computer science, both graduate and undergraduate, have essentially unlimited access to the educational computing facilities. The systems are entirely self-operated and run continuously. Students also have the opportunity to build software for these systems. Several major programs now in use at Yale were developed as a result of student projects. The computing facility continues to grow and improve as the understanding of how to do things improve, and as more sophisticated systems become available.