The faculty and graduate students who use the core laboratory services, facilities and other resources represent a wide spectrum of disciplines from physics, chemistry, astronomy, cardiology, and evolutionary biology to philosophy, business and music. The ongoing success of ARS directly relates to cooperative efforts undertaken with University faculty. ARS provides a broad range of technical support for advanced computation, including procuring, configuring, implementing, and maintaining systems within a variety of facilities.
Various computers provide processing support for computationally intensive research and instruction.
Within this facility are the supercomputer Trex, an SGI Power Challenge XL with 16 processors, Vraptor, an SGI Challenge L with six processors, and Iguanodon, an SGI Origin2000 with six processors. In addition to maintaining the core facility, ARS strives to provide consulting, technical support, and software services to assist computational research and instruction. In support of the SGI Varsity program, ARS can provide SGI Software, such as compilers and debuggers, and software contracts, all at a greatly reduced cost. ARS is the contact for SGI software problems on campus, and maintains a complete set of SGI FAQs, system patches and SGI CD indices. Some academic research involves projects that would take incredibly long periods of time as well as enormous amounts of memory to process on an average computer.