About Us

Penn State and the Centre Region

Penn State, chartered in 1855 by the Pennsylvania legislature as a pioneer institution to provide higher education for students from all economic sectors, admitted its first students in 1859 and graduated its first class in 1861. Penn State is among the largest land-grant institutions, with about 36,612 undergraduates and 6,302 graduate students at the University Park Campus. Penn State University Park Campus offers 148 baccalaureate degree majors in its eleven academic colleges. The Graduate School offers 128 graduate programs at University Park Campus. The University is located in State College, a community of 38,420 residents. The area, known as the Centre Region, lies in a broad valley between wooded mountain ranges. The total population for the Centre Region is 79,406, not including students who live in campus residence halls. There are numerous local and state parks in and around State College. Both the University and the Centre Region offer a wide variety of opportunities for participation in music and the arts. During the summer months, theatre, music, and dance, as well as the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts and Grange Fair are available.

The University mailing address is The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Penn State's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, formed in 1993, combines the strengths of the Department of Computer Science and the Computer Engineering Program. The computer science component originated in the 1960's, and the computer engineering program in the 1980's. Faculty emphasize the theoretical and practical application of computation and computer systems to the needs of society. Research interests cover the broad areas of architecture, computational theory, computer applications, and software systems. The research programs in the department are enhanced by combining the expertise of the two former groups. By merging the hardware design emphases in computer engineering with the software design emphases in computer science, we now have the critical mass to offer breadth and depth in our academic programs.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering offers Bachelor of Science degree programs in computer science and in computer engineering; Master of Engineering, Master of Science, and Doctoral Degree programs in computer science and engineering at the University Park Campus. The first Ph.D. in computer science was awarded in 1969 and 144 doctoral candidates graduated in computer science. The first Ph.D. in computer engineering was awarded in 1989 and 32 doctoral candidates graduated in computer engineering. Ninety-eight doctoral degrees have been awarded in the computer science and engineering major. Two hundred fifteen graduate students are currently computer science and engineering majors at University Park. Course enrollment exceeded 6,800 students for computer science and computer engineering courses in the last year.

The department at University Park currently consists of forty+ graduate faculty members. The department holds weekly colloquia with speakers from other universities and industry. A variety of interests within computer science and computer engineering are explored in these talks. Graduate students are required to take a minimum of one to three credits (one for master's students, three for doctoral students) of CSE 590--Colloquium, and are strongly encouraged to attend all the colloquia because of their educational value and timely interest.

Computing Facilities

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering maintains computer systems laboratories to provide facilities for both research and undergraduate/graduate instruction.

The labs are supported by clustered pair of Sun V240's, two Sun E450 servers, a Sun V880 server, and over 2 terabyte of storage. These servers act as file and license servers for over 300 Solaris, Linux, Windows, and OSX workstations in labs, graduate student offices, and faculty offices in Penn State's flagship technology building, the Information Sciences and Technology Building. In addition to the E450's, there are several other Sun Ultra 2 class servers that provide print, mail, news, NIS, and name services to the department and university at large. An 18-node cluster of Sun Netra T1's is available to students for course work and unfunded research. Funded research efforts utilize SGI workstations, several HPC clusters (8, 16, and 32, and 96 node clusters funded through NSF CISE/Instrumentation grants, an 82 node cluster funded by an IGERT grant, and a 32 node cluster provided by an IBM SER grant), various PC's a Fakespace RAVE, 3 terabytes of Hitachi 9980 SAN storage, and a variety of Sun equipment. The computing resources are connected via a pair of 3Com 7700 Switching Routers. The routers interconnect backbone devices (servers, storage, tape backup) with gigabit speeds, and serve most client devices at 100 megabit. The connection to the campus backbone is via a firewall-protected gigabit interface.

Network Connections

Communication with other research facilities across the nation is maintained through the Internet and Internet2. These connections are facilitated by a mix of (OC-12) Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology and Multiple Gigabit Per Second Ethernet links. Through these networks, convenient and fast access to the nationwide computer science research community is available.

The University Park Campus is networked to the Internet and Internet2 through an OC-12 link.

Information Technology Services

Penn State's Information Technology Services (ITS) provides centralized computing facilities for many aspects of university life. The student computing labs at University Park are available to faculty, staff, and students. There are over fifty computer labs and classrooms with about 2400 computers on the University Park campus, as well as over 1000 mobile computing ports that provide users with workstations and peripherals for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix platforms. The labs have any combination of Windows, Macintosh, or Linux systems. They are equipped with printers and scanners, as well as more specialized hardware such as digital cameras and CD burners. To learn more about ITS services, please visit their web site: http://its.psu.edu/.