The Computer Aided Design and Engineering Lab (CADE) in the Warnock Engineering Building, a bank of high-end Linux computers for engineering students, has undergone a big hardware and software upgrade and is open for business.

The lab in room L224 in the lower level of Warnock has 75 newly upgraded Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines from Universal Systems, each with Intel i7-10700 processors, 64 GB of memory, and high-speed NVMe solid state drives. The lab is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (though access to Warnock is restricted after 10 p.m.). All 75 computers are also accessible remotely by going to https://nx.eng.utah.edu.

The computers are available for all engineering students to use. Popular software includes integrated circuit tools such as Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor and machine learning tools like Torch and TensorFlow. Students can also use the computers for modeling programs such as Ansys and for computing environments including MATLAB. Students can request to have other software installed on the machines by contacting the lab at opers@eng.utah.edu.

The computers now run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 operating system, allowing students to use the latest software, said Linux Systems Administrator Zane Zak.

“CADE has by far the most computing power of any of our student labs,” he said. “If you need to run long, high-performing simulations, it’s a no brainer to run them at CADE.”

CADE is broken up into two labs, allowing instructors to reserve them separately. In addition to CADE, there are six computer labs for engineering students, including one with Apple computers and five labs with Windows machines. More information regarding these labs can be found at https://cade.utah.edu.

Story was written by Vincent Horiuchi, College of Engineering