Computer Science Program

The CS program was spawned from the Department of Mathematics by Bob Geitz and Richard Salter.

CS classes are held in King, which is also where the faculty's offices are located.

Contents

[edit] Current Faculty

[edit] Staff

[edit] CSMC

Computer Science Majors can communicate their Computer Science woes to the Computer Science Major's Committee. They do lots of stuff, like schedule games night, and miscellaneous work that no one else wants to do.

[edit] Computers

[edit] Main Server

The main computer science server, OCCS, is a product of Sun Microsystems. It hosts the web page, which recently had a complete overhaul, and now includes its own wiki.

[edit] Lab machines

The CS department makes workstations available to individuals taking CS classes in the CS labs. The workstations all use the x86 architecture and have both Windows and Gentoo GNU/Linux operating systems. There are two labs, the Quiet Lab (King 201) and the Social Lab (King 135). As the names may suggest, the Quiet Lab is a clean, noise-free zone for CS students to work, whereas the Social Lab is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

[edit] Historic people and computers

In the fall of 2004, the CS department purchased new Gateways with Pentium 4 processors with multiple cores (hyper-threading technology). They all came with LCD monitors, optical mice, and IEEE 1394 (FireWire, in Mac parlance) ports. These computers are all named after historic figures and computers picked out by Ned. They are: altair, appleii, babbage, backus, colossus, commodore64, dijkstra, dvorak, eniac, hopper, ibm360, jennings, knuth, lovelace, mauchly, moore, pdp11, ritchie, rivest, shannon, sinclair, stroustrup, thompson, torvalds, turing, univac, vonneumann, wozniak, and z80.

[edit] Lord of the Rings

In the fall of 2005 the CS labs received new computers to replace the old 200 are Gateways with Pentium 4 processors. The new computers are identical to the model described above, and have largely kept the same names as their predecessors, named them after characters from Lord of the Rings. The ones avaiable for regular use are: aragorn, boromir, celeborn, eomer, eowyn, faramir, frodo, galadriel, gimli, gollum, legolas, merry, pippin, saruman, tombombadil, and treebeard. In addition, elrond and gandalf are running headless (without monitors) and host the /oligarchy and /anarchy filesystems, as well as a number of online games (I think some MUDs or something). Gandalf is where CS majors play nethack, as well (not a network game, despite its name).

[edit] Clusters

When mp3.com was bought out, an Oberlin alum was put in charge of getting rid of their dual-Xeon rackmount servers. This alum gave them to the CS department. Ned is using them to construct two Beowulf clusters, with the help of the Beowulf ExCo. The smaller one (maybe a dozen nodes) will be available to anyone with a CS account. The larger one will give priority to faculty work, but students who need it will be able to use it with permission.

[edit] Culture

Like computer science departments at other universities, the CS department at Oberlin has a reputation for being eccentric. While not nearly as reclusive or antisocial as the stereotype on other campuses would suggest, CS students nevertheless spend long periods of time working together in the lab, and therefore develop an unusual camaraderie. When not working on assignments, upperclassmen can often be found in the Social Lab playing computer games, cracking terrible jokes, watching video clips, reading news websites aloud, or discussing technology and politics. CS majors at Oberlin are generally known for their wry sense of humor, as is reflected in the Cookie file, a compendium of witty things said, read, or made up by CS students and faculty since the 1990s.

On a more academic note, there is a respected tradition of upperclassmen being available to help underclassmen debug and understand code, even outside of regular lab hours.

[edit] Artifacts

The Social Lab is home to a the DFA Ball, a silver-colored inflatable ball with a deterministic finite automata on it. It is occasionally used for pickup games of DFA Soccer.

Due to the insistence of Nick Ferrara ('08), the lab stapler must always be kept in the fridge to keep it fresh.

One musn't forget the famed CS Lockpick of Computer Science -- the device allowing all CS majors access to the lecture halls for movie watching.

[edit] Student Resources

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