The EPS Department maintains an Instructional Computing Facility to support teaching and student research. The ICF lab room in Geological Museum 103C has 13 graphics workstations -- 12 student, 1 instructor's -- running Windows XP Pro. To promote both instructor-led and peer-to-peer visual analysis and discussion, workstation and a laptop dock video outputs are connected by a matrix switch to twin high-resolution projectors.
The PC workstations are interconnected on a gigabit network switch with a Linux Samba network drive & Domain server. For security this network, which hosts both the EPS ICF and RCC (Research Computing Common), is private and protected by a firewall. The Linux server allows instructors and students remote access to their home directories by ssh/scp. There is also separate access to the FAS wireless network for roaming student and instructor laptops.
The facility is designed to provide ample space for work involving computational effort along with access to materials like geologic maps and portable lab equipment.
Users have access to a variety of printers, plotters, a large format color scanner, tape drives, and other peripheral i/o devices.
Courses also have access to the Harvard/SGER EPOGEO Visualization Facility in the Shaw Lab.
A variety of basic and advanced software is available on the PC's and (via terminal and X11 access) the linux server. This includes Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Reader, Adobe Photoshop, CIAO, Deneba Canvas, ERDAS Imagine, ESRI ArcGIS suite, Ghostscript, Ghostview, GMT, Gocad, GPS Utility, IDL, Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Neuralog, Putty, R, SAC, SecureCRT, SeismicMicro Technologies Kingdom Suite, Splus, SPW, Steam, web browsers, and the Cygwin "unix" environment. Additional software can be licensed and loaded at the request of instructors.
ICF accounts are also RCC accounts, and persist during a user's tenure at Harvard. ICF software is accessible via the RCC workstations, and is also loadable on user pc's, for use outside the ICF lab room itself. Hence software and materials developed for course work by faculty and instructors are available for independent study and research efforts. We encourage faculty, instructors, and students to view the ICF/RCC ensemble as an interdisciplinary computational facility that they are helping to build.
The ICF facility is open to all members of the EPS community, including students in hosted courses. Please contact George Planansky ( george_planansky@harvard.edu ) for more information on facility resources, co-developing course materials, scheduling the lab room, getting accounts, etc. .