Physics Computer Support Center

Physics Department, Kansas State University

The old VAX server room in the lab Scientific computing clusters The current Physics server room

Departmental Computer Requirements

 

Highlights:

The Physics Computing Support Center was established in 1997 to bring order to the chaos that then reigned over computing in the Physics department. It was originally known as the Physics Computer Support Team, and grew out of our electronics repair shop. It has long since absorbed the old shop and become critical to the operation of the department. PCSC provides both hardware and software support to the Physics department (and to several other KSU units).

General computing in Physics is based on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. A wide range of productivity software is available. Several research networks of Linux machines are supported, as are several high-performance computing clusters.

PCSC is overseen by the department's Computing committee. The committee usually meets about once a semester and is chaired by Kevin Carnes.

News:

  • Please read our laptop computer policies before using this form to request work.
  • The new HP Storage Area Network System (SANS) is finally ready to deploy. Once up and running, it will provide an additional 9 TB of storage space.
  • Our Barracuda Networks anti-spam appliance intercepted nearly 20 million messages in 2009. That's about 97% of all our e-mail traffic!
  • Watch for the appearance of Exchange 2010 and Windows 7 in 2010.
  • Students may get low-cost versions of Windows 7 and Office 2007 from Microsoft. Free versions of development software and the Expression Studio are also available via the DreamSpark site. Free, limited versions of the development packages are available to all as Visual Studio Express. Please note that the student editions are for your own use, not for departmental machines.