Welcome to PUPR - Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico

Current and expanding facilities currently available to students at the ECECS Department include five laboratories. These laboratories have been established in the last four years with grants from the DoD, NSF, and the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO). Some are used for classroom activities and others for graduate research and studying. The established laboratories are:

The Data Communication Laboratory and Advanced Network Laboratory
The High Performance Computing Laboratory (HPC) that includes three PC Clusters and an Altix 350 Supercomputer.
The Windows to the Caribbean Laboratory.
The Turing Laboratory for Graduate Studies.
The Information Assurance Wireless Laboratory (IAW)

The basic goal of these laboratories is to support research and education in computer science and engineering. These laboratories also support research in other basic sciences requiring sophisticated computing facilities. PUPR owns valuable High Performance Computing (HPC) equipment such as the 2 Beowulf Clusters of 64 processors each, and the Altix 350 supercomputer of four processors. A third PC Cluster with 256 processors sponsored by a grant from the NSF was installed in the HPC Laboratory in December 2007. A very important laboratory is the Information Assurance Wireless Laboratory (IAW Lab) sponsored by a DoD grant of $196,800 in 2007. The IAW laboratory was completed in August 2008.

Our computer laboratories are described below:

Data Communications and Advanced Network Laboratories: NSF funding has been previously provided to establish a network laboratory consisting of 20 PC’s and two servers, Additionally various equipment for networking such as firewalls and wireless communication have also been installed. This lab will connect with the wireless IA network to support research projects and education in security issues such as: steganography, watermark, firewalls, intrusion detection, cryptography, and VPN technologies, among others.
The High Performance Computing Laboratory (HPC) is mainly sponsored with a grant obtained from a proposal awarded by the DoD (proposal No. 46760-RT-ISP) in 2004. Under this grant a PC Cluster of 32 node dual processors to support scientific and engineering research at graduate and undergraduate levels was acquired. A state-of-the-art PC Cluster with 256 processors sponsored by a grant from the NSF was installed in the HPC Laboratory in December 2007. We acquired an Altix 350 supercomputer with four processors that will be used for the development and optimization of IA and Security applications, Visualization, Data Mining, among others. The proposed research projects will interact with these supercomputers.
The Windows to the Caribbean Laboratory (funded by a DoD project grant awarded in 2005) can utilize a setup of three smart rooms to employ speech technology to enable cross-cultural and cross-lingual remote access to the international research and teaching community. The infrastructure provides a valuable platform to allow researchers in speech recognition to obtain data from multi-media environments with access to rich data of multi-modal, multilingual corpora of natural speech. The resulting data is useful for studies of emotional speech and gestures as a function of culture and gender in formal and informal settings. Furthermore, data will be collected in Spanish, which forms one of the major demographic components of clients in the US market using any speech recognition system in a natural setting. Networking, algorithm design, and Artificial Intelligence all play a leading role in projects for these rooms. Our students and faculty benefit greatly from the learning experiences that are shared through this important infrastructure.
The Turing Laboratory for Graduate Studies has been mainly sponsored with funds obtained through a proposal submitted to PRIDCO (a local government agency) for $450,000.00 in 2003. These funds are being used to support research at the graduate level and to obtain incentives to attract and retain PhD faculty in the Computer Science and Engineering areas. The facilities are used for education and research.
The Information Assurance Wireless Laboratory (IAW). The IAW laboratory merges real hardware elements with software and virtual technologies. These two allow for the creation of a multitude of different environments that allows hands-on experiences on a broad range of security techniques and attacks. The lab provides for demonstrations of the different kinds of attacks/defense that can be performed on a system. It allows the instructor to setup the environment to emulate different real world scenarios, utilizing different network topologies, operating systems and connections (e.g. Ethernet, wireless, Bluetooth). The laboratory environment allows students to practice, and experiment with their skills in areas such as network security, virus and worms, cryptography, control and audit, logical security and physical security, secure software/systems development, software testing, configuration management, assess risks, and many others. Also, it provides access to the latest trends and technologies in the IAS field. Students are in contact with all the areas that may affect the security of a computerized system. This lab is a key component in our goal to establish the Center for Information Assurance and Education of Puerto Rico, with the CAE/IAE designation.