New Computer Lab and Teaching Facilities

by Richard Scalettar, Vice Chair for Graduate Matters

Winter Quarter 2001 marked two important events in improving instructional resources for phy-sics courses and re-search —the completion of a new computer laboratory in Room 106 of the Phy-sics/Geology building, and the opening of a new room, 266 Everson Hall, for Physics 7 laboratory sec-tions. Both of these were crucial to maintaining a high level of undergraduate education for our students.

In Spring Quarter 2002, we opened a second room—114 Walker Annex—for additional Physics 7 lab-oratories.  A third room in TB 114 was ready for classes by Fall Quarter 2002.

With the expansion of the UCDAVIS Engineering program and the further development of laboratories for the Physics Honors sequence, the traditional space for undergraduate instructional labs in Roessler Hall became increasingly inadequate. Winston Ko and Wendell Potter worked hard to convince the cam-pus to allocate the addit-ional space for these rooms. A lot of hard work went into converting this space for Physics 7 lab sections. Features include special tables to facilitate active dis-cussions between students and with the lab TA's, as well as imaginative new equipment and demonstrations empha-sizing the key-conceptual ideas on which Physics 7 focuses.

Meanwhile, room 106 of the Physics/ Geology building now houses a modern computer laboratory for our graduate and undergraduate students. The new facility replaces room 505 and the original linux server, "Lifshitz," and the ten color x-terminals which provided access, with a modern cluster of sixteen high performance Dell PC's.

All files are stored on the "new" Lifshitz, a 733 MHz Pentium III, 133 MHz front-side-bus, 256 MB RAM. It has a 17" Trinitron monitor, two 9.1 GB, RAID-1 internal disk drives that mirror one another, and an external, RAID-5 disk array which serves as the "home" file system. Lifshitz has a PERC2, dual-channel RAID controller so that the disk redundancy for both the internal and external drives is managed in hardware, not by the operating system. Lifshitz also has a redundant power supply and a UPS. In short, the server has been configured to be especially stable and to keep the cluster well afloat. An HP 4050N printer completes the room's hardware.

Also available is the full range of linux supported software commonly used in physics research. The C and fortran compilers along with the BLAS and LAPACK libraries provide a core set of utilities for serious compu-tational work. Mathematica is currently available only on lifshitz because of license restrictions.

One additional computer running windows has been put in the fourth floor printer room to provide access to that operating system. The color X-terminals from room 505 have been moved into first year graduate student offices.

Student use of this cluster is steadily increasing. Indeed, for the last few months, all sixteen machines have typic-ally had numerically intensive, computational physics progr-ams running in background. Besides use for homework assignments associated with courses, research projects have ranged from lattice gauge theory and high energy physics detector design simulations to studies of hysteresis and flux line motion in solids. In addition, the new room has also already provided temporary internet access for a Higg's Workshop held in the Physics Department and to the summer "COSMOS" high school science program. While we anticipate the great majority of the use of this facility will be for students, it will also simplify the task of hosting such conferences and other educational events.