Proposals

Abstract

The Department of Mechanical Engineering offers computing resources that are widely used by undergraduate and graduate students in the Department, by College of Engineering students and by all students enrolled in the Department's general education offerings. In 2011, as part of an effort to offer specialized engineering software to students remotely in order that students would not need to visit our computer labs, STF funded the purchase of two Remote Desktop Servers. These servers have proven to be a big success and are very popular with students. After three years, the concept has proven itself and we would like to request the replacement of these servers which are now out of warranty and inadequate for the amount of users and type of software we support. With the more powerful array of servers requested, we will not only be able to provide a more reliable and quality service, but we also for the first time will be able to offer CAD software remotely because of recent advancements in operating system technologies and hardware that now allow use of graphics intensive software over remote connections. Remote access to CAD software such as Solidworks is an often requested service and with these new servers, we will finally be able to offer this to our students completely eliminating the need to visit our computer labs as long the student has a quality internet connection and personal computer.