UW CSE
Educational Infrastructure Project
Introduction
The objective of this project is to convert the
"core infrastructure" of the Department of
Computer Science & Engineering to Intel
Architecture systems running the Microsoft
Windows NT operating system.
We have made enormous progress over the past
three years in moving much of our instructional
and research computing to IA/NT systems. Some
of this progress will be detailed below.
The goal of this project is to migrate core
services such as email to IA/NT systems, and to
dramatically increase the use of digital media
in all aspects of the department's operation.
Previous work in converting instructional and
research computing to IA/NT systems
Intel's investments in the University of
Washington Department of Computer Science &
Engineering has had a transforming effect on the department,
and through its leadership, on the campus as a whole.
Like most major computer science departments, the
University of Washington's department was more-or-less
a "Unix shop" as recently as four years ago. That is
when Intel donated two dozen 90MHz Pentium systems
to create an instructional laboratory for our
undergraduate majors. The first activity in this new
laboratory was the hosting of the Pacific Regionals
of the ACM Student Programming Competition in Autumn 1994.
One indication of the impact of the laboratory is that
by last year, our students had become proficient enough
with Wintel tools to place first in the Pacific Regionals
(besting the teams from Stanford, Berkeley, UBC, etc.)
and second in the International Finals (out of an initial
field of more than 1000 teams). Computer Science &
Engineering now boasts nearly 600 Intel systems -- two
thirds of our total installed base:
- Our extremely aggressive
two-quarter
introductory
programming sequence is taught
to more than 2000 students annually in a PC laboratory.
- The majority of our undergraduate major courses are
taught on PCs.
- We are in the process of converting additional key
courses, such as our computer graphics sequence.
- The "digital design" course sequence that is part
of our Computer Engineering degree program uses PC tools
(converted from Mac tools a few years ago). (For a
NetShow video showing the projects from last spring's
digital design capstone course, see
here.)
- We teach other capstone design courses specifically
geared to the PC platform -- for example, a course in which
teams of students build distributed, multi-player, 3D
videogames using Microsoft tools (VC++, Visual SourceSafe,
and DirectX) and development methodologies. (For a NetShow
video featuring this course, see
here.)
- Our part-time distance-learning
Professional
Masters Program utilizes PCs as the sole platform -- PC-based
Internet video tools for distance learning, PC-based projects, a PC
instructional laboratory for students who do their work on
campus, etc. (We will say more about our PC-based distance
learning in the description of the CSE Gigabit-to-the-Desktop
project.)
- Because of severe space constraints, we don't have research
labs in the department -- the research takes place on the
graduate students' desktop platforms: on PCs. You
can see the results in efforts such as these:
Goal of this project
The goal of this project is to reproduce this
remarkable success in research and education
for the core infrastructure of the department:
- To make IA/NT systems the default mail servers and
clients in the department, replacing Unix.
- To provide first-class support for IA/NT users in
areas such as file service and file backup, so that
users will choose to use IA/NT except in cases where
there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.
- To dramatically increase the use of IA/NT-based
digital media throughout the department.
Progress reports