The College of Science maintains a diverse array of classrooms and laboratories on the Fairfax and Prince William campuses of George Mason University.

College of Science Fairfax Campus

Facilities on the Fairfax campus include extensive chemistry, astronomy, and physics labs located in Science & Technology 1, an HRPT satellite antenna, as well as the new George Mason Observatory.

Observatory

Located on the roof of Research 1, the new observatory, with a 60cm-class main telescope, will not only allow students to enjoy the night time sky from a better vantage point above the fourth story roof, but it will also give them an opportunity to see how a professional telescope facility is operated and maintained. The Department of Physics and Astronomy hopes to make telescope operation available to all students via the World Wide Web for use in their astronomy laboratory projects.

While the main purpose of the observatory is to meet the educational needs ofGMU's students, it will also be a special place shared with our Washington, D.C. community. Evenings "under the stars" each month will be offered to the region's residents.

Computing

The College of Science offers a wide selection of computational platforms for research and graduate study. The largest capability machine is an SGI Altix BX3700 shared memory system with 64 processors and 128Gb of memory, connected via high speed to 10Terabytes of disk. Additional resources include an SGI Altix 3300, SGI RASC system, linux cluster, a beowulf cluster and several special purpose linux clusters. College of Science faculty regularly utilize national centers for large computational tasks. Graduate students in COS also have access to several Linux computer labs at the Fairfax campus 24 hours a day via card key access. The student labs have approximately 2 Terabytes of data storage available for class and dissertation research.

College of Science Prince William Campus

COS facilities on the Prince William campus are partially shared with the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), the world's largest collection of living biological cultures. Facilities include molecular biology and biochemistry labs, computer labs, cold rooms, and instrument rooms, as well as faculty offices. Available computer facilities include more than 60 SGI workstations, including a four-processor Onyx, 18 Octanes, and more than 40 O2's. An SGI Origin 200 provides more than 65 GB of high-availability RAID disk storage. Other computational resources include SUN Sparc Stations, Macs and PCs. All computers are connected via a high-speed (100 MB/sec) Ethernet LAN. Teaching facilities include three computer classrooms equipped with SGI workstations configured with advanced bioinformatics, visualization, and data-mining software. Three wet labs for teaching and training are supported by adjacent computer labs, lecture rooms, prep labs, and equipment labs, including four ABI 377 and two ABI 310 automated DNA analyzers.