ECE provides wired computer network access throughout departmental office space. This is a large and complex network with dual homing on the UofT backbone, routers, gateways, firewalls, traffic monitoring, and nearly 40 switches, serving over 3000 jacks in 48 grad rooms and over 300 offices and labs in Bahen, GB, SF, Pratt, Engineering Annex (and a few locations elsewhere). We operate four climate-controlled server rooms, including one for user-managed servers and clusters.

Our network design accommodates our professors' requests for a range of flexible connectivity options. Some professors have opted to manage their own networking including IP address space, DNS, and optionally self-managed firewall and/or DHCP ('tier 3'); others have asked our department staff to manage all these aspects of their networking ('tier 1' and 'tier 2'). A few professors have entered into industry partnerships whose terms require special network configuration to ensure compliance with non-disclosure agreements ('private networks'). PCs on a private net have limited network access, only through a staff-administered (tier 1) gateway PC.

As well, computers linked to staff-administered networks may be assigned either to be user-managed, or administered exclusively by our department support staff. We use VLANS - virtual LANs - to manage connectivity between computers on the same support tier. For better security, we isolate staff-administered computers and networks from user-managed ones:

• Tier 1 connects staff-administered Windows and Linux desktops and servers;
• Tier 2 connects all user-administered PCs and servers that rely on staff-administered network firewall, DNS and DHCP IPs;
• Tier 3 provides unmanaged access to UofT's backbone for specific professors, with all aspects user-administered (IP space, DNS, firewalling)

ECE staff also administer Linux and Solaris servers and can provide user login accounts on these managed systems for research computing, including networked storage with archival backups, and for running Linux or Solaris software applications such as Cadence, Verilog, etc. and compiling user source code.

ECE provides full-time support staff for research computing (as of fall 2016, six full time staff). Part of the cost of these services is paid out of the department budget, while the rest is recovered through charge-backs to each ECE research professor based on the number of PCs on staff-managed networks (tier 1 & 2), number user login accounts on staff-managed servers, and for users without either of these assigned, a modest minimum charge per supervised research group member (grads, postdocs, RAs, techs and visitors/casuals). Each professor is assessed one 'tier 3/wireless only user' fee for each supervisee who is not assigned a billable Tier 1/Tier 2 PC or user login account. (We sometimes refer to this for brevity as a 'tier 3 fee', though it is applicable to any supervisee whether their supervisor does or does not operate a tier 3 network.)