The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) moved to the newly-built Min H. Kao Electrical Engineering and Computer Science building in December 2011. The $37.5M facility houses 165,000 square feet of faculty, staff, and student offices, conference rooms, academic and research laboratories, and classrooms. Multiple laboratories are dedicated to engineering courses such as Signals and Systems, Networking, Circuits, Electronics, and Embedded Systems. One laboratory is used for Senior Design projects. Three general-access computer laboratories are available for instructional purposes:
Hydra – 31 Dell OptiPlex 7090 computers with 10th Generation Intel Core i7-10700 processors, 16GB DDR4 SDRAM, and NVIDIA GeForce 1660 Super GPUs. The computers run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Installed applications include standard Linux development tools including Visual Studio Code, CUDA, MATLAB, and a variety of open-source software applications.
Tesla – 31 Dell Optiplex 7020 computers with 14th Generation Intel Core i7-14700 vPro processors, 32GB DDR5 SDRAM, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 GPUs. The computers run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Installed applications include standard Linux development and Visual Studio Code, CUDA, MATLAB, and a variety of open-source software applications.
Programming Clinic – 8 Dell Optiplex 5080 computers 10th Generation Intel Core i5-10600 processors and 16GB DDR4 SDRAM. The computers run the Microsoft Windows 11 operation system. Installed applications include standard Windows development productivity tools including Visual Studio and Office 365, Keysight ADS, ANSYS Electronics Desktop, Cadence PCB Design, Comsol Multiphysics, CST Studio, Digilent, LTSpice, Maple, MATLAB and AMD/Xilinx Vivado.
Various additional limited-access Windows laboratories run the Microsoft Windows 11 operating system. Installed applications include Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, Keysight ADS, ANSYS Electronics Desktop, Cadence PCB Design, Comsol Multiphysics, CST Studio, Digilent, LTSpice, Maple, MATLAB and AMD/Xilinx Vivado. Instructional laboratories and conference rooms have large screen LED displays or video projection capabilities.
EECS also operates virtual laboratories that are available for secure remote access via Microsoft RDP (Windows) or RealVNC/SSH (Linux):
VLSI - Virtual lab of Red Hat Linux 8 and 9 virtual desktops with a minimum of 6 virtual processor cores (based on Intel Xeon Silver 4214R or better) and 20GB of RAM. Installed applications include Cadence University Bundle, CST Studio, Siemens/Mentor Graphics Modelsym, Keysight ADS, Synopsys Sentaurus, AMD/Xilinx Vivado, and various Process Design Kits.
VDI - Virtual lab of Windows 10/11 virtual desktops with a minimum of 4 virtual processor cores (based on Intel Xeon Gold 5318 or better) and 8GB of RAM. Installed applications mirror those available in the departmental Windows laboratories.
Min H. Kao network technologies include 1 Gbps Ethernet and two WiFi6-capable wireless networks:
eduroam – a secure network available to faculty, staff, and students. In addition to wireless access at UT, faculty, staff, and students are able to obtain Internet connectivity when visiting other participating eduroam institutions.
ut-open – an unsecured network available to faculty, staff, students, and visitors.
The EECS departmental infrastructure includes centralized authentication, web, file, print, and database services. The EECS IT staff maintains two independently climate-controlled data centers in Min H. Kao, a 1500+ square feet main server room as well as an auxiliary data center with colocation facilities for research systems. Both data centers are backed by a centralized Eaton 93PM 200kW uninterruptible power supply and Diesel generator. EECS IT provides full system administration services to administrative, academic, and research systems including security, software management, and hardware monitoring for both Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.
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Updated April 22, 2025