About the lab

Founded in 2007, the Interdisciplinary Visualization Research Laboratory is located inside the Department of Computer Science on the University of Pittsburgh main campus (Oakland). The laboratory provides approximately 500 sq. ft of lab space equipped with high-end 3D graphics computers and specialized software. Each researcher and graduate student has their own desk and machine. The computers are connected to the Computer Science Department's 100M-bit Ethernet network with access to the Internet via the University's fiber-optic backbone, allowing for fast and efficient data transfer to and from the lab.

The Department of Computer Science provides leading-edge computing technology to the Laboratory faculty and students. The Departmental network infrastructure encompasses more than 700 servers, workstations, and other devices and supports a wide variety of architectures and platforms. Multiple servers provide file, compute, software, and print facilities. The department operates a 16-node Sun X2100 dual-Opteron compute cluster, seven dual Xeon compute servers, a Sun Enterprise 450 dual-processor compute server, twenty-five AFS file servers, four Sun Netra servers, forty-five Macintosh workstations, and a computing grid of 387 IBM-compatible PCs. Gigabit Ethernet links supply network connectivity to every machine. An 802.11b wireless LAN allows untethered access to Departmental resources. Optical fiber-based Gigabit Ethernet links connect the Department to the campus backbone, PITTNET.

As a co-founding member of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and the Pitt Center for Modeling and Simulation (CMS), the Department of Computer Science has further access to the Cray T3E, J90s, AlphaServer 8400, Intel cluster and the Terascale Computing System of the PSC, and to the CMS PittGrid. The University of Pittsburgh Grid Computing initiative PittGrid (www.pittgrid.pitt.edu) harnesses the unused CPU cycles across the Pitt Campus to create a virtual supercomputer (200 processors) that can be used for research, simulations and computationally demanding projects from Pitt faculty and researchers.

The Laboratory and Computer Science Departmental facilities are maintained and administered by five professionals and several student staff members, all available to assist the lab projects in matters affecting systems and connectivity issues.

About this site

This site has been developed by Yinglin Sun and Matt Liegey, students at the University of Pittsburgh. The photographs and pictures on this site are courtesy of the lab members, as well as the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the Pitt Teaching Times, and Pitt students Nat Wetzel, Matt Czarnek, Dan Oliphant and Chris Henne.