The Bilkent Computer Center (BCC) provides a variety of computing resources and services to meet the administrative, educational and research computing requirements in the university community. These services include providing computational equipment, their hardware and software maintenance, maintenance of software resources such as compilers, utilities and application programs. Additionally, BCC develops in-house application software for the university itself including the academic information system, student information system, library information system and others.

Eight high performance file servers include two high performance file and computation servers with 20 CPUs and 1GB RAM each and another high performance server with 4 CPUs and 512 MB RAM. Two high capacity file/storage servers are available on the university network to host the users' personal files.

More than 100 high resolution graphics-capable UNIX workstations are on the BILNET (Bilkent University campus network) and thus accessible to faculty and students.

Personal Computers

There are approximately 4000 personal computers distributed in offices and laboratories throughout the campus and all are connected to BILNET.

Workstation and PC Laboratories

A UNIX workstation lab and 14 laboratories (approximately 600 computers in total) are administered by BCC and are open to faculty and students, 24 hours a day and throughout the year. All users have access to laser and high speed matrix printer pools available in BCC labs and the Computer Center. In addition to the BCC labs, labs run by individual faculties and schools, such as UNIX workstation labs (40 workstations), 12 PC labs (more than 300 PCs) and two Macintosh labs (32 Macs) serve students and faculty around the campus. All computers in the laboratories have BILNET and Internet access.

Networking Capabilities

The campus network is built on a Gigabit Ethernet backbone. This star topology backbone connects all the faculties to the central switch via fiber-optic cables. In each faculty, the fiber-optic Gigabit Ethernet is converted to 100 Mbit Fast Ethernet segments.

There are three terminal servers and a modem pool which provide approximately 100 dial-in connections. Bilkent University has a total of 53 Mbit/sec Internet bandwidth over three different connections, including a 15 Mbit/sec private satellite connection to the USA. All computers on BILNET have direct Internet access.

All students and faculty are authorized to have accounts for their e-mail and their access to the resources in the labs.

Dorm Net

Bilkent University's networking facilities are extended to the dormitories as well. All campus dormitory rooms are wired for the Ethernet and students living in the dormitories can connect their own computers to BILNET and the Internet.

High Performance Parallel Computer

A Parsytec CC-24 MPP parallel system is installed at Bilkent University. Parsytec CC is a distributed-memory message-passing multicomputer and contains 24 processing elements, each equipped with 133 MHz PowerPC with a total memory of 1,892 Mbytes. The interprocessor node-to-node communication bandwidth is 50 Mbytes/sec.

PC Cluster

A Beowulf cluster of 32 Pentium PC's are maintained for research on parallel scientific computing problems.

Some software developed in-house are also available to faculty, students and staff. The most widely used one being BLISS (Bilkent Library Information Services System), which enables readers to browse the Bilkent Library catalogs on terminals or WEB pages on the Internet. AIRS (Academic Information Review System) and SRS (Student Review System) are the valuable tools to help the faculty and students in planning their course loads and academic preferences. ORS (Online Registration System) enables students to see and register to offered courses via computer terminals.