Cybersecurity Engineering Laboratory

Three students stand among the servers in the Cybersecurity Engineering Lab

The Cybersecurity Engineering Laboratory is located in the Engineering Center. This laboratory allows for a state of the art learning opportunities for students in the School of Science & Engineering, especially in cybersecurity, computer science, and computer engineering majors. The Cybersecurity Engineering Laboratory houses several high-capacity servers including a blade chassis. It also houses a set of enterprise access switches, edge switches, core switches, core routers, and wireless devices connected over a 40Gbps optical interconnect fabric.

The laboratory allows students to gain real-life experience, as most large companies have a similar server room or data center. In computer science and engineering courses, students can write code on their laptop or a lab computer, then they can connect through a high-speed network to the laboratory, and run their code on the servers, which have more than 20 physical cores and 256GiB of RAM, allowing complex code to be executed quickly. Faculty can also use it to work on their research or more computationally complex projects in upper-level courses.

Ascension Technologies (formerly Ascension Information Services) was the lead sponsor for the Cybersecurity Engineering Laboratory, with generous support from their friends at Integration PartnersExtreme Networks, Inc. (formerly Avaya), and Dell EMC. This laboratory will also provide opportunities for Ascension to bring their staff to AU’s campus for periodic training. The value of the room and equipment is nearly $1 million.

The laboratory was built in part with Bolt-A-Blok, an innovative new building material from 3B Construction Solutions, Inc. The Bolt-A-Blok system is four times as strong as traditional blocks, can be assembled by a layperson, and can be disassembled and redeployed.

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