Facilities
The facilities of the RSGL
include hardware and software for image processing and
geospatial analysis, as well as a wide array of ancillary
and supporting equipment. The heart of the computer systems
is our relationship with the Environmental Resources
Spatial Analysis Center (ERSAC).
Hardware
The foundation of the Center
is a 155Mb ATM network connecting over 30 workstations
and a Silicon Graphics Origin 200 GigaChannel server
housing the mass storage devices and applications software.
A second RAID has recently been added to the system,
bringing the total amount of disk space to 390 Gb. Workstations
are installed and accessed remotely in each department,
but are supported and administered centrally for a seamless
virtual research platform.
The Center facilities also
include a wide array of input-output devices including
digitizers, image scanners, color scanners, color laser
printer, and large format color plotters, as well as
an array of data storage devices.
Software
A large suite of applications
software provides state-of-the-art capabilities for image
processing, mapping, modeling, statistical analysis,
and visualization. Access to the following major software
systems is provided by ERSAC:
ArcView and ArcInfo (http://www.esri.com)
The Forestry
Library is the primary site for most of the University's
collection of books and journals on remote sensing,
as well as major GIS journals. The University
of Minnesota Libraries is the 17th largest research
library in North America and includes over 5 million
print volumes, 48,000 serial subscriptions, and 3
million government documents.
