Computer Science facilities

Mac suite

The mac suite was opened in January 2017 and is exclusively for the Computer Science department. The suite has 27 high spec iMacs and is installed with various compilers and software development tools. This suite is used for teaching, project work and private study for Computer Science students.

Linux suite

The Linux suite holds 30 HP i7 desktop Windows machines, all installed with the latest Scientific Linux 7 OS for all scientific computer needs. This suite is used for teaching, project work and private study for Computer Science students.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a small credit-card sized computer. By attaching hardware to it and developing software for it, you can learn how embedded computer systems work. Within the Computer Science Department there are 50 Raspberry Pis, which are primarily used to teach first year undergraduates.

High performance computing (HPC)

Following a £3 million investment, the University of Exeter designed a facility (ISCA) to serve advanced computing requirements for all research disciplines. ISCA combines a traditional HPC cluster, with a virtualised cluster environment. This in turn provides a range of node types within a single machine.

ISCA is available free of charge to all research groups across the university, and consists of a range of computer resources: the traditional cluster (128 GB nodes) is complimented by two large memory (3 TB) nodes, Xeon Phi accelerator nodes and GPU (Tesla K80) compute nodes. The non-traditional element of Isca includes a cluster of higher memory nodes (256 GB), 3 TB nodes, and an Openstack environment for the management of virtualised resources.

Contact: For further information on ISCA please email the ISCA team.

3D visualisation suite

This 50 seat lecture theatre is equipped with 4m widescreen duality stereoscopic projection system. This consists of dual LCD projectors with polarising filters which project the same scene onto the screen from slightly different viewpoints; polarising glasses worn by the viewer ensure that the left image is seen by the left eye, the right image by the right eye, thus providing a stereoscopic view with an illusion of depth.

Teaching and study space

In addition to the suites, the university has over 180 individual HP i7 machines, dedicated for students within the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences. These spaces are used for teaching, private study and project work.