Computing Resources at ODU CS
The Computer Science Department
at Old Dominion University offers a wide
array of facilities, resources, and services to
our faculty, staff, students and guests. The
assets are distributed between Dragas Hall
and the Engineering and Computational
Sciences Building (E&CS). This system
architecture enables our services to be
configured in a redundant/highly-available
manner. This stability and resiliency is
essential to maintaining a high level of
service to over 2,300 users.
with the latest mid-ranged Intel based
workstations. These machines utilize a
minimum configuration of Intel Core 2
Quad processors operating at 2.8 GHz and 4
GB of RAM, up to an Intel Core i7 at 3.4 GHz
with 8 GB of RAM. There are also several
Macintosh based systems. Dragas Hall also
contains several instructional and research
labs, our satellite administrative office,
secondary conference room, redundant
datacenter, extended network operations
center, and support staff offices.
High Level Networking Diagram
E&CS Building
The E&CS building is home to our
primary datacenter and main administrative
office. It also houses several of our
research labs, a state-of-the-art multimedia
conference room, multiple classrooms, our
network operations center, and our Open
Research Lab (OR Lab). The OR Lab is one of
our two labs that are available to all CS
students; the other is the Problem Solving
Lab (PS Lab) located in Dragas Hall. Both of
these labs are open during regular business
hours with on-site lab monitors and may be
accessed 24/7 by request via BASIS
managed proxy cards. They are equipped
Our network is utilizing a redundant
configuration of 10Gig and 1Gig fiber-optic
connections between buildings with
multiple paths out to the WAN provided by
the University. Each datacenter contains
multiple 10Gig interconnected servers for
our heavily used services and a minimum
1Gig connection to the remaining servers
and workstations. Various VLANs are used
to segment the network, isolate traffic, and
enforce security policies. Our 100%
wireless coverage allows users to take
advantage of A, B, G, and N secure
connections from either of our buildings.
VPN access is available for remote users to
access services on our network. All
departmental telephone communication is
provided via VoIP Avaya phone systems.
We offer a heterogeneous
computing environment that primarily
consists of Windows and *nix based
workstations and servers. On the Windows
domain, users are offered network logons,
Exchange email, terminal services via our
Virtual Computing Lab (VCLab) where users
can have access to our software remotely,
roaming profiles, MSSQL database access
for research, and Hyper-V virtualization for
research/faculty projects. For Unix and
Linux users we support Solaris, Ubuntu and
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
distributions. Our *nix services include
DNS, NIS, Unix mail, access to personal
MySQL databases, class and research
project Oracle databases, and both Linux
and Unix based FAST aliases for secure shell
sessions.
A view of our clusters
In addition to the standard *nix
services, High Performance Computing
resources are offered to users in the form
of multiple Intel-based Rocks HPC clusters,
which boast high-speed Infiniband QDR
interconnects and top out at a combined
3.5 TFLOPS. A Beowulf cluster is available
for use in distributed computing classes. We
also offer several GPU servers utilizing the
newest CUDA paradigms, and a virtual
Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) server
with 64 physical cores and 512Gb of
memory.
Storage for a majority of these
resources is redundantly provided via two
EMC Celerra NAS devices, one located in
each datacenter. This design allows for
replication of storage across the network to
ensure high availability. These systems
provide a combined total of 100Tb of
storage and dozens of file systems. Users
are provided with CIFS and NFS mounts for
use in both windows and *nix
environments. We also use these devices
to provide iSCSI targets for our VM
environments. Research users are allocated
storage based on project needs and
availability. All user data is backed up
multiple times per day as snapshots on our
EMC devices and maintained onsite for up
to two years on tape.
Additional services provided include,
but are not limited to, user web pages, ondemand virtual machines through our Cloud
services, copy and print services, audiovisual broadcasting and recording,
teleconferencing, and 24/7 end user
helpdesk and support.