Reviewers' Notebook: Equipment and Use of Technology
From CSWiki
Teaching and research in the Department of Computer Science are supported by the Mathematics Local-Area Network (MathLAN), which we share with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
MathLAN was created in 1987 to provide Grinnell College students in mathematics and computer science courses with a modern, accessible, well-stocked computing environment. It currently comprises about a hundred and seventy-five workstations, six servers. All run the Debian distribution of GNU/Linux operating system; about half are dual-boot machines that also run Microsoft Windows.
MathLAN provides a large variety of software for computing (various programming-language translators, the DrScheme programming environment, Eclipse, etc.), mathematics (notably MATLAB, Maple, Mathematica, and R), and document processing (such as Emacs, TEX, and OpenOffice.org). MathLAN also hosts the Department's Web, Wiki, mail, database, and ftp services.
More than a thousand students, faculty, staff members, and recent graduates of Grinnell College currently maintain accounts on MathLAN.
All of our offices and classrooms have MathLAN workstations. In each classroom, the instructor's workstation is connected to a Proxima projection system, making it convenient to conduct in-class demonstrations and presentations. In each of the classrooms, it is also possible to connect portable computers to the projection system, to accommodate presentations prepared elsewhere.
We support an open lab (Science 3815) with nineteen MathLAN workstations, which is open in the evenings and on weekends as well as during the day. User consultants monitor the lab in the evening and weekend hours. The open lab is also set up for use as a classroom in exceptional situations. An internal door connects the open lab with our introductory classroom (Science 3813), which contains nineteen more workstations in an open arrangement.
In our network lab/classroom (Science 3819), also containing nineteen MathLAN workstations, each computer has two Ethernet interfaces, which will make it possible to set up an isolated local network in that room simply by rebooting the machines.
The project lab/classroom (Science 3818) was designed to be reconfigured easily to accommodate different upper-level courses, semester by semester.
MathLAN was originally constructed with funds provided in part by the National Science Foundation, the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, and the W. M. Keck Foundation, and was subsequently funded in part by the Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement program of the National Science Foundation and by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
In addition to the MathLAN machines, some of our faculty use independent Macintoshes and wireless notebook computers in their offices and research labs. We expect that the Macintoshes in faculty research labs will eventually be integrated into MathLAN. Wireless access is managed by the College's Office of Information Technology Services, which maintains several access points in the Science Building.
