IT Support Overview

About the IT Support team:

Photo of SSG signThe Computer Science department has dedicated IT support (System Support Group) in each Pearson Hall and Atanasoff Hall, as well as supplemental support from the larger LAS IT organization.  The local group consists of full-time IT support staff, and a pool of intrepid students.  As a part of the LAS IT organization, the group also has access to the expertise of a group of nearly 30 who provide support across the LAS College.  You can read more about the LAS IT group here: http://it.las.iastate.edu/

The SSG has a wide range of responsibilities including maintenance of the departmental computer labs, providing desktop support to faculty, staff, and students in the department, providing support in collaboration with research IT for research computing needs, information security, and checkout equipment.

Contact info:

Email is the preferred method of communication to ensure all members of the IT Support group receive the message.

Email: coms-ssg@iastate.edu

Detailed contact information can be found here: https://www.cs.iastate.edu/ssg-contact-info

Services:

SSG provides a number of services to meet the computing needs of the department such as:

Virtual Machines for class projects
Databases
Software

Please contact SSG to request any of these services

Infrastructure:

The IT support group hosts a wide variety of infrastructure for use by the department for teaching and research purposes.  

Teaching infrastructure:

Windows RDP server cluster rdp.cs.iastate.edu
Fedora Linux server cluster pyrite.cs.iastate.edu

More information about the departmental servers can be found here: https://www.cs.iastate.edu/server-comparison

Research infrastructure:

The department has access to the below listed research resources through the LAS Research IT group.

Access can be requested through researchit@iastate.edu.

Resource Description More information
File storage The college provides 2TB of file storage at no cost to each PI.  Please contact researchit@iastate.edu for more info. https://researchit.las.iastate.edu/guides/lss/
Cluster computing Researchers in the department have access to the Pronto & Nova HPC clusters through the College's allocation. Please contact researchit@iastate.edu for more info. http://researchit.las.iastate.edu/
Boutique HPC machines The ResearchIT group maintains several task specific machines meant to fill the gaps not served by traditional HPC cluster resources.  Please contact researchit@iastate.edu for more info. http://researchit.las.iastate.edu/
Departmental VM Infrastructure The Computer Science SSG group and LAS Research IT work together to run a virtual infrastructure for research.  

Labs:

The IT support group operates 4 lab spaces with about 100 workstations in Pearson Hall.

More information about the Pearson Labs can be found here: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/pearson-labs

​Checkout Equipment:

Students have access to a large amount of specialized computing equipment for projects, such as laptops, iPads, Xbox, etc.

More information about checkout equipment can be found here: checkout-equipment