Facilities
The Center for Spatial Analysis, Geovisualization Lab and Earth Observation and Modeling Group (EOM) share computing facilities that are housed in the National Weather Center (NWC), Four Partners Place (4PP)and Stephenson Research and Technology Center (SRTC), all of which are located on the University of Oklahoma Research Campus. GIS classes and workshops are held in a 16 seat computer lab equipped for video conferencing that is located in 2PP room 240 which doubles as a student study lab. 24/7 access to the building, lab and computers is made available upon student request at https://computing.csa.ou.edu/?q=account_form/form . Building and lab access requires an OU OneCard, computer login utilizes OU Net IDs (4x4s). Lab access typically expires at the end of a school year for students or at the end of employment or affiliation with CSA for faculty and staff. Geoinformatics computers are equipped with: The administration and research offices and 18 seat student research assistant lab housed in 2PP and SRTC feature high end Apple and Dell work stations with multiple displays that are equipped similarly to those in the Geoinformatics lab. The facilities also feature printing capabilities including a 44 inch color plotter for large format poster and map production and conference rooms. The geovisualization laboratory, currently located in 1PP, is equipped with twin eye tracking workstations, each consisting of a Windows XP control PC, a 19-inch LCD control monitor, a 24 inch LCD stimulus monitor, and an SMIvision RED 250 desktop stereo eye-tracking unit. These systems are available for use in evaluating visualization and GIS software. Server equipment supporting each of these units is housed in datacenters located in the NWC and SRTC. The servers are Dell branded PowerEdge rack mounted systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Windows Server 2008. The servers provide necessary services in support of CSA and Geoinformatics and house the Oklahoma Data Warehouse and the Oklahoma Tax Comission rate locator service. The servers located in the SRTC server room are used as computation nodes for image processing at the EOM group. Additionally, a large Storage Area Network system that provides 255TB of storage for the EOM group is housed in SRTC. The computing infrastructure is scheduled for regular refresh cycles depending on the use, health, and capabilities of the equipment. Our computing facilities are funded through a combination of Technology fees collected by the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at OU, by research efforts by the Center for Spatial Analysis and Earth Observation and Modeling group and a grant from the National Science Foundation.