Quality Improvement Project for the IT Services and the Library at São Carlos School of Engineering

Abstract

The São Carlos School of Engineering (EESC) currently has 9 Departments: Hydraulic and Sanitation Engineering, Structural Engineering (Civil), Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Transportation Engineering, Production Engineering, Materials Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering and geotechnical department; with 4 Centers: CETEPE - Center for Educational Engineering Technology, CRHEA - Center for Water Resources and Applied Ecology, CEAS - Center for Applied Engineering for Health, EESCIn - Advanced Center for Innovation Support and a Library. The School offers 10 undergraduate courses and 10 Graduate Programs, 4 of which are considered excellent (concept 6 or 7) in the last CAPES Assessment. Its infrastructure consists of laboratories, classrooms, centers and nuclei, library, computer and administrative sectors that total approximately 71 thousand square meters of built area, distributed among the 60 buildings located in 3 distinct areas, being two areas in the city of São Carlos and an area in the city of Itirapina, all connected by optical cabling to the USPnet backbone. Local data networks, called "USPnet-EESC", with approximately 9,000 network points installed, offer its more than 4,200 users (faculty, students and staff) and visitors from other institutions, services from: Websites, hosting environment virtualized servers, data storage, backup system, video conferencing, Wi-Fi wireless network access, access control system, CCTV system, VoIP telephony and others. In addition, the School is made up of 71 research groups registered with CNPq and more than 90 research laboratories, occupying more than 20,000 square meters of built area. Although most laboratories are coordinated by departments and thus allocated to their respective buildings, the use of these laboratories is not restricted to researchers in each department, but rather serves researchers in various departments of the School and even other institutions. teaching and research. Thus, these laboratories serve more than 1,500 postgraduate students, as well as undergraduate students conducting research in undergraduate research, and the almost 180 teachers of the school.Over the years, these research laboratories have received important support from FAPESP and other national and international research funding agencies and public and private companies for equipment acquisition and maintenance, physical area and infrastructure adaptation, as well as funding and scholarships for research. the research students. Within the natural constraints of budget resources, the School has supported the proper functioning of the various research laboratories, mainly by maintaining and adapting the physical areas of the laboratories; maintenance, updating and modernization of computer services (wired and wireless networks, data processing center, appropriate areas for server allocation and data storage, among others); and maintenance and adequacy of common areas of laboratories (rooms and auditoriums for meetings, seminars, lectures, defense of completion works, and video conferencing resources). However, given the breadth of the School researchers' activities, budget resources are often insufficient to guarantee the continued increase in research quality and productivity at desired levels. Thus, the application of FAPESP resources is essential for important improvements in the quality and safety of the computational services provided by the STI-EESC Data Center. In addition to investments in IT infrastructure, EESC elected as a priority the modernization of the Prof. Dr. Sérgio Rodrigues Fontes, a resource for collective use in support of research and the dissemination of knowledge and research results. (AU)