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 Return to: School of Engineering and Applied Science
The University computing environment consists of resources funded and maintained by the University’s central information technology organization - Information Technology Services (ITS), the Executive Vice President and Provost Office, the Vice President of Research Office, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Medicine, the University Library System, individual departments, research labs and centers, and students.
The ITS organization focuses its efforts on key elements that are available to the University at large. They include the network backbone and telephone infrastructure, broadband cable and IP video, centralized data systems, high-performance research facilities, networked services including e-mail, central file storage, wired and wireless Internet access, web publishing, front-line Help Desk support, training, R&D, computer-equipped classrooms, and specialized consulting.
UVA Engineering resources include departmental computing labs and classrooms, the support of discipline specific software packages, school-wide, departmental and lab computing support staff.
UVA Engineering departments and research groups deploy workstations, peripherals such as high-speed printers, scanners and plotters, several clusters and workgroup servers featuring specialized, discipline-specific software, and the Rapid Prototyping Lab. Access to this equipment and software is provided to students enrolled in the School of Engineering’s courses and research programs. Our students use these facilities for a variety of computing activities including course work, projects, capstone design, and senior thesis and graduate-level research.
Some classrooms at the School of Engineering have computers at students’ desks. These computers permit students to learn by working a problem in the classroom, individually or as part of a team, and facilitate interaction between faculty and students.
ITS provides a 1 TB allocation of disk space per student on UVA Box and a 5 TB allocation on O365/OneDrive, cloud-based storage and collaboration services. Access to UVA-licensed engineering, math and science software is made available via virtual machines to students’ laptops https://in.virginia.edu/remote-apps. A Microsoft Campus Agreement provides the Office Suite and Windows upgrades https://in.virginia.edu/studentoffice. Some departments are members of the Azure Dev Tools for Education Program which makes additional Microsoft software available for their courses https://azureforeducation.microsoft.com/devtools. ITS distributes a variety of application software for students, faculty, and staff, ranging from antivirus to research and data analysis software https://virginia.service-now.com/its?id=software_gateway. For new students, the ‘getting started’ IT checklist is published at https://in.virginia.edu/itchecklist.
UVA spaces including classrooms, labs, study rooms, and dormitories have wireless Ethernet coverage. A distributed set of high-speed, B&W and color printers with page print charges are also available that can be wirelessly accessed.
Students also have on-grounds access to an authorized repair center for leading brands of computers and printers through UVA’s computer reseller, Cavalier Computers.
Direct support of students, faculty and research professionals in engineering and science for education, outreach, and curriculum development is provided by UVA Research Computing (RC) https://www.rc.virginia.edu/. RC supports computational research across disciplines. It facilitates training in computational science and high-performance computing (HPC) and works with researchers to solve complex optimization, parallelization, workflow, and data analysis issues.
A centralized Linux cluster and mounted software are available on a shared-access basis. Rivanna provides a high-performance computing environment for all user levels with a total of 575 nodes and 20476 cpu cores. This includes specialty hardware like GPGPUs and large memory nodes. All nodes are supported by a high-performance EDR/FDR Infiniband network using Mellanox hardware. The Rivanna cluster also provides approximately 1.9PB of scratch (temporary) storage on a high-speed Lustre filesystem. Long-term storage is available on a monthly lease basis for use with Rivanna as well as with individual researcher systems. Rivanna supports a wide variety of research-oriented software packages. For researchers who need more HPC resources than UVA can provide, assistance with getting started using the national supercomputing centers is available.
Specialized facilities include the RC VizLab at Fontaine https://www.rc.virginia.edu/service/imaging/.
The Scholars’ Lab supports the digital research and scholarly analysis needs of faculty and advanced students in humanities and social sciences https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/; the UVA Library also offers the Robertson Media Center, the Digital Media Lab, GIS and mapping services, and Makerspace which focus on the creation of digital media, digital imaging, audiovisual production and post-production, physical interactivity, 2D/3D animation, mobile technologies, visualization, the delivery of media content, desktop fabrication, and augmented reality. Each of these facilities has expert support staff.
Teaching and learning tips, techniques and software that support remote learning, hybrid learning, accessibility and usability are available at: https://learningtech.virginia.edu.
The UVA Help Desk is available 24x7 and provides support by telephone: 434-924-4357 or toll-free at 866-469-4866 and by e-mail: 4help@virginia.edu The Help Desk can be also be reached on the web at: https://in.virginia.edu/helpdesk.
UVA Engineering also provides students with central, shared access technology-equipped collaboration rooms. Examples of these spaces are located in Rice Hall (the Information Technology Engineering Building), CAD-workstations in Lacy Hall (Experiential Center) and desktop workstations and equipped conference spaces in Thornton Hall (The James H. Aylor Collaboration Center).
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