Computing Facilities

The IGM School features a wide variety of world-class computing facilities, all of which are available to students in our academic programs. Indeed, RIT prides itself on creating and maintaining computing facilities that are expressly for the purpose of offering students in our courses the best possible educational access to technology, systems, and infrastructure. The School of IGM is situated within the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, and as such has access to a wide array of computing labs and technology enabled classrooms. The college boasts several studio-style classrooms, and dozens of labs with large numbers of computer workstations for individual student use. The IGM School also operates a fully featured sound studio and video production environment, including green-screen capability.

All of our labs and computing infrastructure is supported on the back-end by high-speed networks and access across campus and beyond by support from RIT Information Technology Services.
With respect to the particular curriculum of Interactive Games & Media, the school maintains two very unique laboratory environments in addition to our generalized computing facilities, as well as specific computing clusters that offer services and support beyond the incredible institutional infrastructure that we have access to:

The Game Design & Development Laboratory
The GD&D Laboratory is a custom-built facility that was specifically designed to meet the needs of the undergraduate and graduate programs in Game Design & Development. The laboratory is set out to meet the needs of game development teams of approximately 4-7 people, or a larger team using a multi-pod approach. The hardware in the lab is specifically available through our partnership with Alienware, a manufacturer of high-end PC systems specializing in the area of games and interactive application support. Read more about the GD&D Lab...

The New Media Interactive Development Laboratory
The New Media Interactive Development Laboratory is a specialized laboratory specifically designed to support the needs and curriculum of New Media students. The lab focuses specifically on support team-based work that use a workflow that spans the PC and Mac platforms. In addition, software and hardware are selected that will attempt to “bridge the gap” between the predominately Mac-based production world, and the other production environments within GCCIS that are based on PC hardware. The lab makes heavy use of the Adobe® Master Collection, and features specialized workstations for video capture and editing in addition to the array of workstations that are deployed throughout the lab. In addition, the lab is often an environment in which students can test customized physical installations of various projects – including customized lab furniture and installations for workflow improvements. Read more about the New Media Interactive Development Lab...

The IGM Computer Cluster
The School of IGM hosts a separate server environment specifically focused on the needs of multi-processing support for game portals, multi-user web applications, and massively-multiplayer online game development. This is a relatively new initiative of the school, but one that will be critical to our needs going forward.

Known affectionately as “Skynet” by the students who were on hand when the system arrived, the IGM compute cluster was provided by donation from Microsoft Corporation, and is one of the former clusters that helped to provide the MSN website and associated services world-wide. The system contains 20 “blade” units, terabytes of disk space, and a large amount of RAM for each of the 40 processors in the system. The IGM curriculum is currently exploring offering game-portal services, multi-user real-time 3D worlds, and other such services by using this cluster as a backend. By controlling the backend and associated hardware, we can monitor and reconfigure our experiments as needed, in support and collaboration with our projects and research partners. The system is scalable, and will continue to grow and upgrade with us as we continue to provide additional educational experiences in this area. (Or at least until the system becomes self-aware).

The IGM Administrative Research Cluster
The School of IGM maintaints a cluster of machines in half-rack configuration specifically for experimentation and exploration of administrative operations and associated projects. Not only are we hosting bizarre, off-the-wall projects for students and faculty, we're experimenting with how we deal with school-wide infrastructure issues, and working out the kinks in the programs and processes that will support the school in the future.