The HKU Portal provides a user-friendly and easy-to-access interface for University members to access all the centrally provided IT services including electronic mail, Intranet services, web-based courses, web-based administrative applications and Library services through our high-speed campus network. With the personalised and customisable interface of the HKU Portal, students can choose the types of information they wish to receive and the format to display the information.
Computer Facilities
Powerful central computer servers are set up to support electronic mail and various web-based applications. Software packages for supporting engineering computation, scientific applications, simulations, graphics applications, statistical analysis and database management are installed on these servers for use by staff and students.
The Computer Centre is a pioneer in high performance computing (HPC) development supporting computation-intensive research activities in Hong Kong. The current HPC facilities of the University include a 48 quad-core 64-bit CPU with theoretical peak processing power of 2,304 Giga-FLOPS, a 356-CPU Linux Cluster of 2,045 Giga-FLOPS and a 32-CPU Windows PC cluster. A PC Grid is formed using over 200 PCs in the PC laboratories for providing an additional processing resource for HPC applications. Apart from these HPC facilities, a powerful 24-CPU SUN SunFire 6900 system is dedicated for supporting bioinformatics research.
Campus Network
The Computer Centre has installed a high-speed and sophisticated campus network based on 10-Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet technologies with over 27,000 network points installed which links together all the computer servers, workstations and PCs in the main campus and remote campuses. A ubiquitous network access environment, known as ACEnet (Access-Everywhere-Network), has been established to provide students with roaming connectivity to the campus network.
Wireless connectivity, covered by over 800 WiFi access points, is also available in all centrally-administered classrooms, public areas in the main campus and department offices. Students can easily connect to the campus network and Internet in the halls of student residence via the Hall Network. Besides, students can also enjoy WiFi wireless access off-campus at eduroam (Education Roaming) member institutions, Y5Zone and PCCW WiFi hotspots.
PC Laboratories
The Computer Centre has set up a number of central PC laboratories for use by students and staff members. A wide variety of the latest software packages, including word-processing, web page design, graphical and multimedia tools and statistical analysis is available on the PCs. Laser printing services are also provided in the laboratories at nominal charges. Other than the central PC laboratories managed by the Computer Centre, faculty-based computer laboratories are set up in the respective faculties.