I suspect that Dr. Mascagni has some ideas about a long-term plan. Basically it seems that the views have been split between those who favor a parallel computer vs those who favor workstations. We have some workstations. There are a total of 13 places to use X Windows in TEC 114. There are other labs on campus.
Students can get to computers.
We have no practical environment for parallel computing. We have tried using PVM and MPI on Linux machines over ethernet, but this is a poor substitute for a parallel computer. We need an environment with more CPUs and faster communications to be a reasonable environment for developing parallel programming. I think it is time for Beowulf.