Department of Earth and Space Sciences Computer Lab

The ESS Computer Lab was created for both students and faculty of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences. This is a multipurpose lab for ESS classes requiring the use of computers, for ESS student assignments and other tasks, and for both undergraduate and faculty research. The lab was specifically designed to accommodate the needs of geophysics, geochemistry, GIS, terrestrial and extraterrestrial remote sensing, petroleum/subsurface geology, and hydrogeology classes, but also serves a variety of other disciplines in the earth and space sciences.

Workstations:

The ESS Computer Lab has a total of 10 workstations. Five were purchased in 2004 and are Dell Optiplex GX280 workstations with a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Each of these workstations has a 75 GB primary hard drive and a 150 GB secondary hard drive. Five were purchased in 2006 and are Dell Optiplex GX620 workstations with dual-core 3.6 GHz Pentium D 960 processors and 4 GB of RAM. Each of these workstations has a 80 GB primary hard drive and a 250 GB secondary hard drive. Other features on all 10 workstations include a 3 ½ inch floppy drive, two DVD drives, numerous USB-2 ports, two fire-wire ports, a 10/100 network connection, and Dell speakers with a subwoofer. All the workstations have two Dell 20 inch flat-panel plasma monitors and are using the Windows XP-Professional operating system with Service Pack 2.

Workstation Software:

Software includes the following: MS Office 2003 Professional, E-Trust antivirus, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat, ArcGIS from ESRI, RockWorks from Rockware, ER Mapper GIS and remote sensing software, The Kingdom Suite seismic interpretation software, SPW seismic data processing software, and GMSys gravity interpretation software.

Server:

Each of these workstations, and other computers in the department, are connected to a Dell PE 2800 Server with two Intel Xeon 3.6 GHz CPU’s and 4 GB of RAM. This server has a RAID configured primary hard drive set used for the operating system, programs, and license keys with 70 GB of usable space after configuration. A RAID configured secondary hard drive set used for file serving, file sharing, and backups has 560 GB of usable space after configuration. Other features include a 3 ½ inch floppy drive, a CD drive, an LTO tape backup unit, and two 10/100/1000 network connections. The server also has a Dell 15 inch flat-panel plasma monitor. The operating system is the Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, Service Pack 1.

Other Peripheral Devices:

• An HP 4650dn Color LaserJet printer
• An Epson Stylus Pro 9600 wide-format (44 inch) color printer with Ultrachrome ink.
• A Vidor Select P42 wide-format (42 inch) color scanner.