Laboratory and Computer Facilities

The Wilkinson Computing Lab

The TLab

The Prescience Lab

The VLab

The Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center

The EECS Department has well-equipped instruction and research laboratories for electronic circuits, digital circuits, solid-state electronics, biomedical electronics, communications, microwave techniques, real-time control systems, holography, fiber-optics, coherent light optics, digital systems design, computer systems (including distributed and parallel systems), security, networking, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and robotics.

In addition, the Department has excellent computing facilities, with most of its computers upgraded in the last three years and all of its computers linked to Northwestern's ever-evolving high-speed backbone network connection to the internet.  Specifically, the Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security has several Sun Solaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstations, a Sun Enterprise 250 fileserver, a 16-processor IBM SP-2 distributed-memory message-passing multicomputer, an 8-processor IBM J-40 shared-memory multiprocessor, an 8-processor SGI Origin 2000 distributed shared-memory multiprocessor, and several PCs.  These are connected via a high-speed fast Ethernet network.

The Wilkinson Computing Lab includes several powerful Sun and Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and 28 high-performance Sun Solaris workstations and 16 Windows XP PCs. A wide variety of graphics, CAD, circuit design/simulation, database, and other software packages are available on these machines.

The TLab (“Teaching Lab”) consists of 16 high-end PCs connected to a storage server on a private network. The PCs include powerful graphics cards attached to large LCD displays, dual boot Linux and Windows XP, and are on a private network. They have a wide range of software installed and are used in numerous courses. The TLab can be used for studio instruction. As an adjunct to the TLab, WiFi and camera-enabled Pocket PC handheld computers are available for students to check out for project use with faculty approval.

The Prescience Lab has an IBM e1350 cluster, consisting of 33 dual Xeon nodes on a gigabit interconnect, access to the DOT optical research network via a smaller local e1350 cluster and metro edge router, significant amounts of RAID storage, and a machine/equipment pool for research projects. The Aqua Lab has a 20 node Sun Sparc-based cluster and a 20 node dual Opteron cluster. Collaborations among the Prescience, Aqua, and LIST labs also provide the Northwestern Netbase , a significant router/server infrastructure for high-throughput wide-area network monitoring, trace storage, and analysis. The collaboration also equipment and access to the PlanetLab worldwide distributed systems testbed. The Qualitative Reasoning Group has a very large cluster, the “symbolic supercomputer”.

The VLab (“Virtual Lab”) consists of 11 powerful dual Xeon 64 bit server computers, 2 TB of storage, and a private gigabit network. Students and faculty can create their own virtual computers on this hardware. Their virtual computers can run any operating system and they have root access.

The Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center is our new state-of-the-art teaching facility. New designs will come to life at the center. Presented with real-world problems from clients, students can work their ideas out in the CADD (computer-aided drafting and design) lab and rapid prototyping area located on the sub-basement level and then move those plans up to the basement-level “factory floor.” The large flexible, barrier-free workspace with its concrete floor is where designs actually get built. Students can use the design prototyping lab and fabrication facilities, which include machinery such as lathes, milling machines and large saws, to build design projects both large and small.

The Ford building also features a vehicle testing area, a mechatronics lab for building circuit boards, a 60-seat classroom, a conference room, research labs, group study rooms, project display areas and a student commons area. Faculty and graduate students from the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science have offices on the second and third floors, and labs in the subbasement.

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