Equipment

The Department maintains a network of UNIX and Windows based systems which are available for use by senior and graduate students. First year computing facilities are provided by the Science Faculty. The value of the current senior/graduate equipment base exceeds R2M. The available equipment includes:

Servers

17 Machines running a variety of operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, WindowsNT, Windows2000, Windows2003) that provide Web, email, domain, file, print, research and other services to the department as a whole.

Workstations

200 Workstations comprising of Unix and Windows operating systems, including Network Computers with simultaneous Unix and Windows operating systems on the desktop, notebook computers and high-end Intel XEON and AMD based systems.

Printers/Scanners/cameras/projectors

6 network laser printers, 2 high-resolution scanners and a range of digital cameras.

Science First Year Laboratory

The Department is the major user of 150 Windows PCs in this laboratory.

The current undergraduate student-to-machine ratio is about 4.5:1, which needs to be improved.

Programs

The Department of Computer Science is a paid-up subscriber to the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance program. The program allows the department and registered Computer Science students easy access to software from Microsoft.

Free and Open Source Software

The Department makes extensive use of open source software, which is available at no cost, primarily under the GPL and BSD licenses. The software is provided by the FreeBSD Project, the OpenBSD Project and a multitude of private individuals and other vendors. The types of software employed range from operating systems, to network infrastructure services, to word processing and typesetting suites.