Facilities

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The Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) was established at the University of Arkansas in 1991. CAST has a full time staff of 21 and supports numerous graduate students. External support is provided from sources such as DoD, USGS, NSF, USDA, EPA, state agencies, and many other public and private sources.

In July 2007 the CAST offices and staff moved in to the just completed JB Hunt Transport Services, Inc. Center for Academic Excellence. In addition to the main offices and teaching and research labs now in the JB Hunt building, Center staff also maintain the teaching and student research computer labs in Ozark Hall (Ozark 208, 215 and 209) for the departments of Geosciences, Anthropology and the Environmental Dynamics Program.

CAST has been selected as a Center of Excellence by Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Intergraph, Trimble, MapInfo, and Skyline Software and has a multi-year CRADA with ESRI. In total the Center has received more than $15 million in hardware and software support from its private partners.

The JB Hunt Center is a 110,000 sq ft state-of-the art research and teaching facility. CAST occupies 11,000 square feet of offices space and computer laboratories. The Center has more than 100 high-performance workstations - many configured for 3D data extraction and manipulation in stereo - and approximately 30 larger application and data servers with more than 100 TB of disk. These UNIX-based servers provide a highly flexible system by overlaying a Citrix Xenserver virtualization environment with a wide range of guest operating systems – including Microsoft Server 2003 and 2008, Ubuntu, CentOS, and RedHat Enterprise. The entire building has 1 GB home-runs to all desktops and a 10 GB backbone providing access to both Commercial Internet and Internet II. Details on the Center's extensive suite of hardware, software and research instruments are provided at these links.

With funding from NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and Cyber Infrastructure (CI) grants, CAST purchased and maintains an extensive range of field instruments for remote sensing, survey, photogrammetry, geophysical survey, and related research. Surveying systems include Leica Viva GS15 GNSS and Trimble 5700/5800 GPS receivers configured for both static and kinematic operation and a Trimble 5600 Robotic Total Station DR200+, a Leica C10, Z+F 5006i, Optech ILRIS-3D, a Breuckmann smartScan HE and a Konica-Minolta Vivid 9i 3D Scanners, seven Pro/XE/XM Trimble handhelds, 20 Trimble Juno handhelds and a 55 foot lift boom.

Geophysical instruments include a fluxgate magnetic gradiometer system, ground-penetrating radar system with 400 MHz antenna, earth resistivity and IP meter, a resistivity system with MPX15 multiplexer, and an EM conductivity/magnetic susceptibility meter.

In addition to CAST, the JB Hunt Center houses: