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Microlab (uLab), Server Room, ICE (Integrated Circuit Engineering) Lab

The Microlab/ICE lab area is a student-run computer engineering laboratory. Students in the “uLab staff” are responsible for maintaining the computing resources of the EE department. The uLab staff support the needs of the electrical engineering faculty, with ultimate supervision by the EE department chair. The Cooper Union IT Department funds the staff and provides supervision.

The computing facilities have significant autonomy from the schoolwide computing facilities. Specifically, the EE department has full control over a subnet. The uLab provides dozens of virtual machines and containers hosting stations, over fifty workstations that are all centrally managed and orchestrated (distributed throughout the EE labs, not necessarily all in rooms 602/603), and six physical services including a GPU compute node.

The purposes of the uLab include:

  • Supplement computing services provided by the Cooper Union IT Department to the Department of Electrical Engineering.
  • Support student research projects in computer engineering.
  • Provide an opportunity for students to have positions of responsibility, requiring leadership, professionalism and a call to service.

Rooms 602 (“Microlab”) and 603 (“ICE lab”) are essentially computer rooms, although there may be other equipment, such as oscilloscopes and FPGA development boards, depending on the projects.

ICE is an acronym for “Integrated Circuit Engineering.” The computers in this room tend to have advanced software packages, such as Cadence , which is used for chip design and electronic circuit simulation in courses such as ECE342 Electronics II, ECE345 Integrated Circuit Engineering. We also have ADS software for microwave domain design. Various electives, as well as senior and master projects use these special software tools. Other tools, such as MATLAB, are installed widely on practically all computers.

The server room 602A is a separate locked space that is located between the Microlab and ICE lab and has computer and networking equipment that requires additional cooling.  Normally, only electrical engineering faculty and Microlab staff have access to the server room. The primary computing facilities kept in the server room include:

  • Servers used for various courses, such as ECE366 Software Engineering and ECE345 Integrated Circuit Engineering.
  • GPU Cluster: 32-core, 64-thread GPU-optimized server with 256GB RAM, two large ZFS storage arrays, one Tesla K40c GPU, and 5 Titan X Pascal GPUs. A GPU based cluster which provides access to high end computing.
  • Networking equipment (routers, switches, etc.).

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.