High-Performance Computer Engineering

SMAPhaseFraction
Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) behavior under varying temperatures and stresses
The first workstation-level laboratory on the TTU campus, the CAE Lab was founded by Professor Robert Mabrey in 1984 after being awarded an $850,000 grant from General Electric. This funding purchased a VAX 11/785, 4 GE Calma workstations, and SDRC I-DEAS software for modeling and analysis. Professor Mabrey taught senior and graduate level courses using the facility, and the laboratory was used in many research and analysis projects for TVA, the US Navy, Martin-Marietta, Fleetguard, and Aerostructures.

In 1989, a $1,200,000 grant from Sun Microsystems allowed the installation of a Sparc-based network with 57 workstations and 4 servers in both the CAE lab and the college's Engineering Workstation Laboratories.

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High-Performance Computer Engineering Lab Workstation
During the 1990s, various smaller projects across the College of Engineering purchased PCs and Sun workstations for the lab on an ongoing basis.

In 2000, an $80,000 project funded by university technology fees enabled the lab to purchase two high-end Sun Ultra80 workstations, 1 dual-processor Xeon workstation, and a 90GB disk array for file storage. The Center for Manufacturing Research donated a file server and a single-processor Xeon workstation as a match for a National Science Foundation project. Support in 2001 and 2002 has included $80,000 of technology fees and nearly $30,000 in matching funds from university faculty with a stake in the lab's success. These funds have gone toward improving the PCs, workstations, and infrastructure that helps drive the college's research projects.

Today the CAE lab is administered by the Center for Manufacturing Research as it continues nto the twenty-first century as the university's first high-performance computing laboratory, and the College's premier site for modeling and finite element analysis.

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