COMPUTING SUPPORT & POLICY COMMITTEE Minutes of the 55th Meeting 17th July 1995 1. Present: Morris Sloman (mss), Jim Murphy (jim), Bob Pullen, Paul Kelly (phjk), Sylvana Zappacosta (sza), Ian Harries (ih). 2. Apologies for absence: Amanda Pash (ahp), Duncan Gillies (dfg), Jeff Magee (jnm), Mustafa Ghanem (mmg). 3. Minutes of the last meeting were agreed. 4. Matters arising from previous meetings 49.1.2 Student home pages PHJK to circulate statement confirming that all students may produce personal home pages, under the guidance of their tutor. 54.7.4 PC for PhD student Bobby Batacharia No revised case has been received. [ACTION: PHJK to send reminder]. 5. Chairman's actions 5.1 Agree to moving two HP9000 workstations to the real-time lab for summer projects sponsored partially by the HP Bristol Lab; 5.2 Agree to loan of Mac to Ian Hodkinson over the summer. 5.3 Agree to allow Wayne Luk to forward spend 8K on "Synopsis" software to support FPGA lab as outlined in College Plan bid. 5.4 Agree to request from Omer Rana (PhD student) to allow DocSoc (Dept of Computing student society) to mount a web page, under the supervision of Jeff Kramer. 5.5 Agree to Narankar Dulay's request to spend 150 on software to make the department's 4D database accessible via the Web. 6. Mathematica licensing: Agree to forward-spend 2000 pounds on site license for Mathematica (provided this is not an annual charge). This will support JMC students (who use it in their first year on machines in the Maths dept), and will be used in lab/coursework associated with Antonia Jones' Neural Nets course. It will also be used for projects, for example in the performance analysis area. The license will cover research use. [ACTION: JIM to order and to inform research users]. 7. PC monitor for PhD student Nenad Koncar Agreed ca.200 pounds for a new monitor for this student's PC. The monitor will remain the property of the department [ACTION: JIM to include in PC order below]. 8.1 Graphics equipment Duncan Gillies and others have requested Silicon Graphics equipment for graphics teaching. Agreed 20K, which should be enough for at least two machines (SGI Indy 133MHz R4600PC, 8-bit colour, 32MB/1Gb, 17" monitor and Indy Cam) with some kind of enhanced video option, and software. The machines are expected to be sited in the Project Lab, i.e. the enlarged area mainly used for PCs (see below). Systems administration for the machines, probably including backup, will be subcontracted to CCS (this is how our existing SGI workstation is managed). There is no requirement for cross-mounting filestores with DoC machines, nor for email. JIM confirmed that, providing the hardware arrives in good time, the machines will be available for project use by 1 November 1995 at the very latest [ACTION JIM and DFG to decide precise specification, order and install]. 8.2 PC provision Ian Harries and Niranjan Jayasundera presented a range of proposals for 20-25 new PCs. It is important to order at least some of the new machines immediately so they will be available for use by October. The existing PCs will remain in use. There was a discussion about the balance between high-specification machines and lower-spec machines. Current usage of PCs does not justify very high performance or multimedia facilities for most machines. However we hope to stimulate more ambitious projects and class exercises in Multimedia and HCI which would use the machines' capacities. We agreed to order 10 high-specification machines immediately, and to reconsider the question in a few months' time. The precise specification has yet to be determined, but the initial proposal is along these lines: Intel Pentium P54C at 100 MHz, PCI/ISA bus, 16 MB RAM, 1GB Hard Disk, Quad Speed CD ROM, MJPeg adaptor, 17 inch non interlaced Hi-Res monitor, Camera. The machines will generally be administered by CSG, and will be available for use by 1 October. System and user files for our existing PCs are served by a Sparcstation. IH plans to allow PCs to mount students' Unix home directories from the main teaching fileservers, but system software will still be kept on the SparcStation for resilience. Some upgrade to this machine may be needed. Future operating system developments may improve this situation. Networking infrastructure (e.g. hubs) will be needed. The machines will be situated in the expanded area currently occupied by the existing PCs, which will be called the Project Lab and will include some other graphics/multimedia equipment (e.g. the SGI machines above). It was agreed to allocate a budget of 35K, which should include the PCs, the network and fileserver costs, and any necessary software. [ACTION: JIM and IH to circulate precise specification, allowing a few days for comment, before arranging purchase. RJP to advise on networking requirements. Service to be running by 1 October]. 8.3 Custom Computing Laboratory Wayne Luk requested funds to support courses and project work using FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays). Being entirely reprogrammable, FPGAs allow digital circuits to be tested instantly, without waiting for VLSI fabrication. The lab would need PCs, FPGA cards to go inside them, software for the PCs, and a large part of the development work would also use Suns for which further software will be needed. To take advantage of a very large reduction in the software costs, a forward spend of 8K was agreed before the meeting, for the Synopsis package. It was agreed that there was no case for new Sun equipment for this activity, but that we should order the PCs and prototyping systems as soon as possible so that they would be available for project use (ie. by 1 November). Because of the 8K forward spend, minimal further software expenditure is expected (some contribution from EE for use of Synopsis should ease this somewhat). It remains unclear what the systems administration arrangements for these PCs will be. The machines will presumably be sited in the Real Time Lab. Agreed a budget of 16K [ACTION: WL to liaise with JIM and IH on PC purchase]. 9. AOB 9.1 Equipment for PhD students MSS observed that new PhD students arriving in October will need X-terminals. The proposal is to buy new, higher-quality X-terminals (e.g. SPARC IPC machines) and allocate these to existing students, thereby freeing equipment for new students. Used IPC and similar machines have intermittently been available for around 1K. This would substantially improve the quality of PhD equipment. It was agreed that, provided suitable equipment could be found, we should plan to spend up to 15K to this purpose [ACTION: JIM/SM to establish availability]. 9.2 X-terminals for undergraduate labs Similarly, to replace failed Sun3 X-terminals and to improve the quality of X-terminal service, it was agreed to plan to spend up to 10K on new, higher-quality X-terminals (e.g. SPARC IPC machines) provided they can be bought at a reasonable price [ACTION: JIM/SM to establish availability]. 9. Next meeting 2.00pm, Wednesday 27th September.