Helpdesk
Informatics has its own computing facilities which are available to Informatics staff and students in addition to those provided by central IT Services. The Informatics facilities are managed by a dedicated team of technical staff. A helpdesk is available for personal assistance, either online or face-to-face.
General Teaching Labs
General Teaching Lab
There are three main teaching labs, each equipped with professional workstations (Dell Precision range) running Windows 7. Software available in the labs includes: a wide range of standard productivity and document preparation tools such as Office 2007, Emacs, MiKTeX and EndNote; a choice of web browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera; a choice of email clients including Thunderbird and Outlook; development environments including Netbeans, Visual Studio, BlueJ, and Eclipse; programming languages including Java, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Python, Perl, Haskell, Prolog and Lisp; and creative and media related packages including 3D Studio Max and Adobe CS5. Many other software packages and tools are also available including MySQL, Aqua DataStudio, Apache Tomcat and the Phidgets libraries. Informatics computing accounts provide a generous quota of network disk storage, a web directory, a subversion repository, and a MySQL account. All user data is automatically backed up and personal configurations are preserved ("roamed") across sessions. All Informatics users have remote access to interactive Linux servers. High quality printing and scanning facilities are available and wireless connectivity is good in all labs.
Specialist Teaching Labs
Media Technology video editing suite
In addition to the general purpose Informatics labs, a number of smaller labs are provided for particular activities (peer-assisted learning or robotics classes, for example). There are also number of teaching labs with specialist hardware. The Music Informatics Lab is based around a suite of Macs and an eight channel sound system; a broad range of music creation and production software ranges from Pro Tools to SuperCollider, alongside microphones, monitor speakers and MIDI controllers.
Another major teaching facility is the Media Technology Lab. This contains two fully-equipped digital TV studios with broadcast-quality cameras, sound recording, digital lighting, etc. Each studio has an associated gallery with control facilities, mixing desks and digital recording equipment. Students using the Media Technology Lab have access to a Mac-based edit suite running professional post-production software, including Final Cut Studio HD. Productions from the MTL studios can be broadcast live or archived for delivery on demand using the department's own web and streaming media services.
Research Labs
Gantry Robot Lab
Each of the research groups in Informatics has one or more specialist labs. These contain facilities such as computer gaming test rigs, machine tools for robot construction, motion capture equipment (such as sensor suits and 3D video technology), eye tracking equipment, a multi-viewpoint observation area with synchronised video streams, networked ubiquitous electronic devices, broadcast-quality television recording, and a gantry robot that allows unrestricted 3D motion within a large volume (e.g. for insect flight simulation).
Research groups have ring-fenced allocations on the University's high performance compute facility, and also run CUDA-based compute servers (containing multiple NVIDIA GPU coprocessors).
Media Technology studio control room