ESU receives computer equipment donation from Wolf Creek

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Economics at Emporia State University has received a significant computer equipment donation from the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation (WCNOC) of Burlington Kansas. WCNOC donated six Sun Microsystems server computers and associated hardware for use by students and faculty. A number of local educational institutions were considered as recipients.

"The donation is very important to us because of the limited budget of the State of Kansas and the level of funding provided to universities in the State. This new resource will allow us to provide student access to the advanced computer systems used in business and industry," said Chuck Pheatt, associate arofessor of computer science in the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Economics.

“The support of Larry Scott, Chair of the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science

and Economics and Rod Sobieski, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences was

instrumental in receiving this donation,” Pheatt said. “Wolf Creek was looking for a

school in the area that could effectively use the equipment and Scott and Sobieski really

helped to make the case.”

Server computers provide users with access to files and shared resources via a computer

network. An example is a web server, which stores files related to web sites and serves

them across the Internet to clients (web browsers) when requested by a user. Server

computers are generally behind the scenes providing the computing resources necessary

to address the request of many users simultaneously.

Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation was organized to operate, maintain, repair

and eventually decommission the Wolf Creek Generating Station. Wolf Creek Generating

Station, near Burlington, Kansas is a Westinghouse four-loop pressurized water reactor

producing more than 1,200,000 kilowatts of electricity.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. is an American vendor of computers, computer components,

computer software, and information-technology services. Sun is known as the developer

of innovative technologies such as the Java platform and NFS, and as a champion of open

systems in general and UNIX in particular and it has recently emerged as one of the

leading proponents and contributors of open source software. Its products include

computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC and AMD's Opteron

processors, storage systems, and a suite of software products including the Solaris

Operating System, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity

management applications.

Last Updated September 24, 2007>