$200k donated to computer science

The future of information technology is literally at Engineering students' fingertips. Software company UNISYS recently donated $200,000 worth of equipment to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to create the Center for Advanced Research in Enterprise Solutions, which will bring the latest technology to the Computer Science department. And on Friday, with the now-retired ENIAC -- the world's first electronic digital computer -- looming over them, about 20 Engineering students gathered to hear about the future of information technology from a UNISYS vice president. "What our students have wanted for some time is the access to a high-performance enterprise server with the latest software packages to carry out more real-world projects," said Computer Science Professor Insup Lee. Lee said his department has always emphasized "concepts, principles, and fundamentals" rather than application. The lab will allow students and faculty to work on projects that would be impossible to run with their own desktop computers' weaker computing power, on some of the most modern and powerful equipment available. Penn is one of four local universities chosen as "satellite centers of excellence" by UNISYS. The other three schools are Rutgers, Drexel and Lehigh universities. The lab has been open for about a month, but Friday marked the official inauguration of the partnership between Penn and UNISYS. UNISYS has equipped the lab with $200,000 worth of hardware and a staff of engineers that act as advisors to student projects. They also provide a list of projects they would like to see undertaken by Penn engineering students. Students may choose to work on these projects -- which are fully funded by UNISYS -- or to apply to use the lab for their own projects. Some suggestions for future projects in the lab involve high-volume transaction processing, high-performance databases for e-commerce systems and web-based virtual file-sharing systems. Those projects initiated and funded by UNISYS become the intellectual property of the company and may be used for future applications without the knowledge of the students who worked on them. Projects that are suggested by members of the University "belong" either to the University or to their creators. UNISYS, however, expects to get more out of the relationship than just the information garnered by these projects. The main objective of its Enterprise Partnership Program is the cultivation of potential future employees. "We traditionally have put research and development into hardware, but we have now turned to the research and development of people," Curt Girod, vice president of Cross Industries at UNISYS, said in his speech on Friday. "Probably the best payoff we have [from the program] is the interaction with the faculty and students, and the employment opportunities that come out of it," Girod added. Through the partnership, UNISYS plans to cast its net into Penn's pool of CSE students, offering summer internships and training and certification programs that will give participants an advantage over other engineers upon graduation. While UNISYS is targeting graduate students and seniors, many proposals for projects have come from students who will join the labor force farther in the future. Vito Sabella, a Engineering sophomore concentrating in electro-engineering, hopes to apply to use the lab for a virtual file-sharing system he and two friends started last November. Thus far, the trio has been running the operation from their desktop computers. Moving to the lab -- which, according to Sabella, is "immeasurably more powerful" -- would allow them to handle many more users at once. The lab is comprised of one "certified cluster configuration" -- a huge, growling tower of hardware that houses four Pentium II processors -- and four Hewlett Packard Vectra desktop workstations.