Portland is Oregon's center for high-technology industry. Portland State University's proximity to ``Silicon Forest'' fosters an atmosphere of cooperation and support between the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and industry. Many of SEAS' graduates find employment in the area nad many students, both undergraduate and graduate, work for local industry as they pursue their degrees.
Tektronix actively supports PSU, providing SEAS with more than $100,000 of state-of-the-art equipment and has funded a $360,000 research and teaching project in software engineering. Other important compainies in the are financing research projects, providing equipment and/or research support are Bipolar Integrated Technology, Electro-Scientific Industries, Fujitsu America, Hewlett-Packard, Mentor Graphics, Sequent Computers Inc., Intel Supercomputer Systems, nCube, Chorus Systems and ADP. The presence of these and many companies provide a unique pool of expertise available to SEAS.
The well established relationship with local industry allows SEAS to provide a state-of-the-art computing environment designed to support the needs of research and education. The computing facilities staff has a wide range of skills which allows the computing and networking environment to be flexible and responsive in meeting the changing needs of the Department. In all, the facilities staff supports over 150 computer systems and X-terminals spanning multiple networks using a variety of automated techniques, many developed internally, to cope withe the high degree of complexity inherent in such a heterogeneous environment.
While Sun computers are highly visible in the Department comprising the core support and educational environment, other computer systems provided by Sequent, Tektronix and Intel, are mainstays of our research activities. The generous support of local industry and government research partners, allows SEAS to maintain a very high quality computing infrastructure capable of supporting a high degree of heterogeneity as required for high quality research. The eqipment includes: three Sequent Symmetry multiprocessors, two Intel Hypercube multiprocessors, and 60 Tektronix X-terminals.
SEAS enjoys network access via a fiber-optic backbone to the Internet through NorthWestNet. SEAS also has access to the NERO testbed, an ATM wide-area network for ecuation and research in Oregon. NERO allows PSU, Oregon Graduate Institute, Oregon Health Sciences University, Univeristy of Oregon, and Oregon State University to interoperate via ATM. The wide are network consists of Cisco Systems routers with ATM interfaces connected to US WEST/GTE Newbridge ATM switches at 155 Mpbs (OC3) locally. A T3 link to NASA's Ames Research Laboratories in California will be installed in the near future.
Areas of research in SEAS of particular interest to this project include: Computer Security, Broadband High-Speed Network Security (Dr. John McHugh, Department of Computer Science); Network Protocols, Secure Mobile and Wireless Networking (Jim Binkley, Department of Computer Science), Software Testing (Dr. Richard Hamlet and Dr. Sergio Antoy, Department of Computer Science), Protocol Analysis (Dr. Tom Schubert and Dr. Sarah Mocas, Department of Computer Science), Mobile and Wireless Communications (Dr. Fu Li, Department of Engineering) and Hardware Description and Design (Dr. Tom Schubert, Department of Computer Science, Dr. Robert Daasch and Dr. Mike Driscoll, Department of Electrical Engineering).
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Email to Jim Binkley:
jrb@cs.pdx.edu