Computer Science and Software Engineering

The Bioinformatics Laboratory is designed to prepare students to serve the computational biology community in the UAE, especially in the areas of genomics and proteomics. The lab provides students and researchers with access to software, and technical support related to computational biology. Several Lab components are taught in the Bioinformatics lab such as CSBP431, CSBP411, ITBP480 and ITBP481. The lab is equipped by the following software/hardware:

• 10 Intel Windows-based PCs.
• HP Printer
• Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktops Software / windows
• SimBiology™
• Win4Lin Terminal Servers

Grid/Cloud computing is one of the most exciting and promising directions in which computation philosophy has shifted from the use of personal computer or individual server to a grid/cloud of computers. Users of the grid/cloud are only concerned with the computing services being asked for. The underlying details and how it is achieved is hidden by a distributed grid/cloud computing infrastructure. The activities are mainly focused on, but not limited to, teaching and research in the following domains: High Performance Computing, Cloud Computing, Grid Computing, Distributed Computing, Peer-to-Peer Computing, Distributed Data Mining, Distributed Ontology Mapping, Security in Grid and Cloud computing, Web services and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and ELearning. The lab is equipped by the following hardware/software:

Hardware:

• 100 computing nodes Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHZ Model X5355.
• 2 login nodes of Dual/Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.93 GHZ Model X7350.
• 2 batch nodes of Dual/Quad Core Intel Xenon 3.16 GHZ Model X5460.
• 2 grid management nodes of Dual/Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHZ Model X5355.
• 1 LDAP server of Dual/Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHZ Model X5355.
• A total highly available Grid shared storage of 9600 GBytes.
• Infiniband connection.

Software:

• Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 media kit.
• Red Had Enterprise Linux for HPC Compute Nodes.
• Intel C++ Compiler Intel C++ Compiler Professional Edition for Linux.
• The shared storage servers are configured by Luster File System for high availability.

The Robotics lab lets the students design, build and program their own robots, in a specially equipped laboratory. The lab feature state of the art equipment such as:

• Khepera II + Webots
• General I/O turret
• Linear vision turret
• Video turret color cameras
• Wireless analog video turret
• Radio turret
• Radio base station
• Gripper turret
• Intel Windows-based PCs

The Robotics lab is designed to allow students to integrate and/or apply the concepts learned in classes such as Programming, Signal Processing, Image Processing/Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Wireless Communication & Security, and Embedded System Design. Students will get first-hand experience of the “real world,” from robot design, to social interaction, negotiation, group dynamics, cooperation, and competition.

The Software Engineering Lab is equipped to enable students to practice the core principles of software construction and maintenance which includes the fundamental software processes and lifecycle, requirement analysis, software engineering methodologies and standard notations, principals of software architecture and reuse, software quality frameworks and validation, software development and maintenance environment. The lab contains 20 (Dell OptiPlex 960) workstations. The PCs in the lab are configured with the following software: Internet Explorer, Microsoft Virtual PC 6.0.156.0. Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, , Publisher, Access, InfoPath Designer, InfoPath Filler, OneNote and share-Point Workspace.  For All machines, the Virtual PC “WindowsXPVM” is configured with the following software: IBM Rational Software Architect Standard Edition, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Netbeans IDE 6.9.1, and Adobe Reader 9. Lab components are taught in the lab such as SWEB319, SWEB423, SWEB401, ITBP480 and ITBP481.

These two Sun OS environment Workstations running the Solaris Operating Environment (a.k.a. Sun‘s version of Unix) used for instruction of UNIX-based courses. Besides the exposure to UNIX-like environments and commands, students also learn in these labs the distributed systems issues inherent to UNIX operating system and may simulate parallel processing across the network of workstations available in these labs, particularly as the workstations are sitting on a dedicated VLAN.

The two general computing labs are equipped with 15 Intel Windows-based PCs. The following software packages are installed on each machine:

• Microsoft Windows Operating System
• Microsoft Office Suite
• Microsoft Visual Studio Suite
• IBM SPSS Software
• Minitab Statistical Software
• MathWorks MATLAB Multi-Paradigm Numerical Computing Software
• Eclipse & NetBeans IDE Programming Tools