The Computational Mechanics Lab is proposed and funded by several faculty (eight form mechanical engineering, four from civil engineering, and one form electrical engineering). These faculty members have been actively involved in research in the areas of computational solid mechanics, computational fluid mechanics, computational heat transfer, and computational electromagnetic field.

The Computational Mechanics Program was established by two rounds of Academic Challenge Grants from the Ohio Board of Regents (the first from 1984 to 1990 and the second from 1989 to 1995). This laboratory features the following hardware:
1. Sun 670MP with 5-disless Sun workstations.
2. DEC Alpha 3000 Tru64 Unix System.
3. DEC 5000 Ultrix 4.2 system.
4. Two IBM CT3 RS/6000 AIX 4.1.4 systems.
5. Three new DEC XP1000 Tru64 Unix workstations (ordered) supporting gigabit network capability.

All workstations have network connections. Connectivity includes to the Ohio Supercomputer Center, as well as the National Science Foundation (NSF) Supercomputers through local area networks and NSF net backbone at high speed data transmission (Gigabit / Internet2 access). DEC Tru64 Unix, IBM AIX 4.14, SunOS 4.1.3 compilers encompass the development software resident on these systems together with the MIT X11R6 window environment.

In addition, numerous versions of large-scale software such as PATRAN, ABAQUS, MARK, LS-DYNA, and FLUENT are made available. These systems also enable connection to the College of Engineering DEC Alpha 600/AU Tru64 Unix systems for additional computational resource needs. With this computing capability, the Computational Mechanics Lab provides faculty with enhanced abilities to produce scholarly research as well as train graduate students in computational engineering.