A wide variety of computing platforms is available for instruction and research. X-terminals dedicated to use by incoming students are attached to a large cluster of Sun workstations, which is managed by the department. Research groups also have large clusters of DEC, Sun, SGI and Intel machines designed to provide peak floating point performance, to analyze the huge streams of data from particle accelerators or from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The latter will exceed 4 terabytes of data!

The department was a major component of Hopkins' successful proposals for Internet II, vBNS, and a large equipment grant from Intel. The entire building is wired for switched 10 and 100 Mbps Ethernet and will be linked to the outside world through a gigabit per second hub as a part of the Internet II proposal. Researchers in the department have been major users of the National Science Foundation's supercomputing centers and computers at national laboratories. Recent projects have simulated the evolution of the universe, collisions between galaxies or the atomic dynamics that give rise to friction. The High Energy Physics group is actively involved with analysis of data from experiments at Fermilab and at CERN.