facilities_statement

EECS Facilities Statement

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. Eleven laboratories are dedicated to engineering courses such as Signals and Systems, Networking, Circuits, Electronics, and Embedded Systems. Three laboratories are used for Senior Design projects. Two computer laboratories are available for instructional purposes:

  • Hydra – 31 Dell OptiPlex 7040 computers with 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7-6700 processors, 16GB SDRAM and nVidia GeForce GT 745 GPUs. The computers run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Installed applications include CodeLite, CUDA, Eclipse, GIMP, NetBeans, MATLAB, Synopsys Saber and a variety of open-source software applications and development environments.
  • Tesla – 31 Dell Optiplex 5060 computers with 4.6 GHz Intel Core i7-8700 Processors, 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 SDRAM and nVidia GeForce GTX 730 GPUs. The computers run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Installed applications include CodeLite, CUDA, Eclipse, GIMP, NetBeans, MATLAB, Synopsys Saber and a variety of open-source software applications and development environments.

Various Windows laboratories run the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system. Installed applications include Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, Agilent, Ansoft, AutoCAD, Cadence, CodeLite, Comsol, CST Studio, Digilent, LabVIEW, LTSpice, Maple, MATLAB and Xilinx ISE. Instructional laboratories and conference rooms have video projection capabilities and/or LED displays. Min H. Kao network technologies include 1 Gbps Ethernet and two 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. A new portal will be put in place to manage network registration and visitor access.

The EECS departmental infrastructure provides LDAP authentication, web, file/print, and database services. Local research facilities include ADA – multiple Dell PowerEdge servers running a broad selection of licensed engineering applications including products from Agilent, Altium, Ansys, Cadence, Comsol, EMA, GE, Mentor Graphics, Manitoba, Plexim, Siemens, Sonnet, and Synopsys.

The Office of Innovative Technologies (OIT) High Performance & Scientific Computing group provides research computing resources and services to the University community. The resources provided include the newly branded Infrastructure for Scientific Applications and Advanced Computing, or ISAAC for short. ISAAC includes resources for research involving non-sensitive information and sensitive information named ISAAC Open Enclave and ISAAC Secure Enclave, respectively.

The Secure Enclave can support research with Protected Health Information and Controlled Unclassified Information which have specific security requirements specified by federal regulations. Support for use of these resources include system administration support, scientific computing support, documentation, training, software installation and maintenance, and other support services.

OIT is responsible for managing a complex network that spans the campus and remote sites throughout the state. OIT Network Services’ responsibilities include the management of the local UTK network (both wired and wireless), multiple wide area connections, and Internet/Internet2 connectivity. In addition, the group manages various security devices such as firewalls, VPN (Virtual Private Network) access devices, IPS and IDS devices (Intrusion Prevention/Detection Systems). At its core, the UTK network supports speeds of 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) and greater for data center systems including the High Performance & Scientific Computing infrastructure. Most buildings are dual-connected at 20 Gbps to the core in order to accommodate applications that require very high bandwidth. Overall, the campus network supports approximately 20,600 100 Mbps connections, 46,600 Gigabit Ethernet connections and 7,500 Ten Gigabit Ethernet connections. A state of the art wireless network consisting of more than 6,500 wireless access points spans the entire campus.

Remote offices are linked to the main campus network using connections ranging from 10 to 500 Mbps. Such locations include offices in Knoxville, Oak Ridge, Nashville, and Agriculture Extension facilities at various locations in Tennessee. Multiple, redundant connections provide the UTK community with access to the Internet at an aggregate speed of more than 15 Gbps.

Networks connect UTK to research facilities at ORNL (Summit supercomputer) and Internet 2 sites via Southern Crossroads (http://www.sox.net) using 100 Gbps links. UTK is a Sponsored Education Group Participant (SEGP), a program that allows us to sponsor other educational institutions’ access to Internet2 resources. Additionally, UTK provides peering and transit services for other UT System campuses.

Two core firewalls and a multitude of smaller, departmental firewalls, are deployed and managed by Network Services. Secure remote access is facilitated through VPN access devices (appliances) that support both IPSec and SSL/VPN access.

Updated July 12, 2021