All faculty and graduate students have desktop workstations in their offices. These are served by central servers via a local network, and they are connected to the campus fiber optics backbone, thus providing easy access to all University networked facilities.

The Department of Mathematical Sciences has recently purchased a 48 processor cluster for distributed supercomputing through the National Science Foundation's Scientific Computing Research Environments in the Mathematical Sciences (SCREMS) program. The principal investigators on the SCREMS grant are Profs. Braun, Driscoll, Monk and Rossi. The new computer, named "wopr," consists of 24, rack-mounted, dual Opteron CPUs connected through a low-cost gigabit Ethernet switch. Taken alone, each processor is a powerful 64-bit CPU that is capable of handling challenging computational tasks. However, the gigabit switch permits rapid communication between the processors so that large-scale, complex problems can be distributed across all the CPUs. Profs. Braun, Driscoll, Monk and Rossi plan to perform a variety of large-scale calculations involving electro-magnetic scattering, high-Reynolds number fluid flows and thin film drainage. These problems would require weeks or months on a dedicated desktop workstation, but the wopr can perform these tasks in a fraction (optimally 1/48th!) of the time. Also, the wopr is available for students interested in learning about distributed computing, and the principal investigators are looking forward to helping students become involved in the exciting area of parallel computing.