UC Santa Barbara Geography / Computing / Labs

The VIPER Lab

Visit the VIPER Lab website.

The Visualization and Image Processing for Environmental Research Lab - better known as the VIPER Lab - is run by Geography Professor Dar Roberts and is devoted to research on the remote sensing of vegetation, land-use/land-cover change, plant physiology, spectroscopy, and wildfire and fire ecology. The VIPER lab provides a centralized region for computational resources, space for student interns, a means for students to collaborate more effectively, workbenches for prepping fieldwork and hardware, and a place for research meetings. To facilitate departmental collaboration, Professor Roberts maintains a relatively open-door policy and is pleased to see graduate students from outside of his group working closely with his students in the lab.

Located at 3611 Ellison Hall, the lab has eight UNIX/Linux servers, RAID-array data storage, and eleven personal computing stations in a secure workgroup environment. Extended software installed includes ITTVIS ENVI and IDL, ESRI ArcGIS Desktop, X-Win32, R statistical package, and the Microsoft Office suite. Some workstations have advanced statistical and modeling programs. The Lab also has a conference room with projector, printer, and Internet access capability for visiting laptops and their owners. Periodicals, literature, site-samples, and data archives are stored in the VIPER Library which doubles as a “quiet reading space” for students and researchers to escape the bustle of the main lab. The Library also has a networked computer with slide and flatbed scanners.

Hardware

• 11 PC Workstations
  • Windows XP
  • AMD Athlon XP, Intel dual Xeon, or Intel Core 2 Duo
• 8 UNIX/Linux servers
  • 27.5 TB RAID-array storage
• Projector
• Printer

Software for Fall 2009

• Software on all machines
• ENVI 4.5
• IDL 6.5
• ArcGIS 9.3.1
• X-Win32
• R 2.9.1
• Microsoft Office suite
• Software on some machines
• ACORN
• Matlab 2008b
• HFIRE
• FARSITE