Columbia University Department of Computer Science

Departmental research computing infrastructure includes a 1,200 square foot Data Center housing approximately 100 compute servers and over 300 GPUs. There is also a VMWare VSphere installation consisting of 10 servers with a total capacity of approximately 500 virtual machine instances. Other services include a load-balanced departmental web cluster, database servers, a backup server with 40 TB capacity, and supporting servers that provide printer, DHCP, DNS, LDAP, and software distribution services to the department. Equipment vendors include Advanced HPC, Applied Data Systems, Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lambda Labs, and Silicon Mechanics. The Data Center is internally connected via a mixture of one and ten Gbps Ethernet and connects externally via the campus fiber network.

Columbia University Information Technology maintains Columbia’s commodity Internet connections, including 20 Gbps via Cogent and 40 Gbps via GTT. Columbia’s research and education network connections include a NYSERNet NYC and statewide regional optical network (”dark fiber”) and a 40 Gbps connection to NYSERNet’s IP network that in turn connects to Internet2 and ESnet.

Technical Support

The research facilities are staffed by professional systems engineers who are responsible for operating system and network support, hardware and software maintenance, and troubleshooting. These staff members allow individual researchers to avoid spending time on hardware and software administration and troubleshooting.

User Fees

The Department of Computer Science charges each researcher a prorated fee of $2,400 per year for use of the computing facilities in the department. This includes use of all servers, cluster computers, storage, backups, network connections, technical consulting and troubleshooting. All faculty, GRA’s, and post-doctoral researchers are charged this fee. The computer user fee funds the operation and equipment of the departmental computing infrastructure, and is charged in accordance with Columbia University Controller Agreement #100988 from Feb. 24, 2006.

The Department of Computer Science, established at Columbia in July 1979, works both in experimental (comprising artificial intelligence, machine architecture, computer networking, graphics, databases, distributed systems, and software systems) and in theoretical computer science (algorithms and computational complexity). This research work, supported by approximately $18 million a year, requires a computing infrastructure within the department to manage and provide shared computing and telecommunications services, full and incremental recoveries, public and commercial software licenses for programming and engineering tools, and management of the complex and varied networking for each research group. The responsibility for providing these facilities falls entirely on the department. Collecting user fees allows the department to offer high-quality facilities and services at a  price lower than that which would be required if each research unit procured services individually using consultants. The Computing Research Facilities (CRF) team is comprised of 6 full time IT professionals.

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