Virginia Tech® home

Department technical resources

Photo by Peter Means for Virginia Tech.

In addition the the research systems available at the university level, the technical staff within the Computer Science department offers a wide variety of resources to support faculty in their teaching and research activties.  Below are just some of the services available to faculty and their students.

Teaching

All instructors have the following resources available to them and their classes:

  • Dedicated technical staff personnel who only provide support for departmental and teaching related services.  In addition, they can provide suggestions, recommendations, and help faculty set up and configure new class-specific teaching resources. 
  • Multi-node Linux based cluster to provide a computational and development environment for instructional classes.  
  • Containerized environment where faculty can create and deploy Docker based containers and run them on the department's kubernetes cluster for instructional purposes.
  • Multi-node GPU cluster designed to provide a NVidia based GPU development environment using CUDA software dedicated to instructional use.
  • A dedicated GitLab repository for instructional purposes.
  • Ability to host course-related websites, VMs, GPU-enabled VMs, and discussion forums.

Research

All faculty have the following resources and services available to them and their graduate students for research:

  • Dedicated technical staff personnel who only provide support for research related services. In addition, they can provide recommendations and help acquire new systems. On a case-by-case basis, they can provide a variety of ongoing support activities as deemed necessary by the faculty member.
  • A variety of secure, enviornmentally-controlled server rooms and labs.
  • An on-premise 180TB shared storage which is encrypted and hardware/software redundant. 
  • Virtual Machine cluster with the flexibility to create multi-core large scale VMs.
  • Virtual GPU Machine cluster with the flexibility to create multi-core large scale GPU-enabled VMs.
  • The department maintains a dedicated GitLab repository for research purposes.
  • Homogeneous multi-node cluster dedicated to systems research.

Other services

The department's technical staff provides the following resources and services to faculty for teaching and/or research:

  • Dedicated technical support personnel who provide computer assistance to faculty and graduate students. Support in maintaining, controlling, and tracking computer inventory.
  • The department provides its own Wordpress instance for teaching and research purposes.
  • A variety of printing services are available, including poster printing for conferences and seminars.
  • The department has access to several site licensed software packages including most all Microsoft products, MatLab, Adobe, and more.
  • Personal website space where faculty members can create and host their own site promoting themselves and their research.