The RHIC Computing Facility (RCF) provides computing facilities for users of the RHIC. The facility consists of two separate components, the "General Computing Environment" or GCE and the data analysis facility.

The General Computing Environment provides a place where users can do general interactive computer tasks that are NOT related to data analysis. Examples of such tasks include sending and receiving email, web surfing, document processing, etc. The GCE consists of an IMAP mail server, "rcf.rhic.bnl.gov", and a interactive Sun based server, "rcf2.rhic.bnl.gov".

The data analysis facility at the RCF is where data from the RHIC experiments are processed and analyzed. This facility provides the computation, storage and network resources required to process the tremendous amounts of data that is produced by these experiments. The computational resources are provided by a large farm of 3200 Intel-based processors running the Linux operating system. The storage resources are provided by a group of Sun NFS servers with 300 TB of SAN based RAID arrays and 500 TB of distributed storage in the Linux Farm, backed by a series of StorageTek tape libraries with a total storage capacity of 7 PB and managed by HPSS. Access to the data analysis facility is through the Ssh gateways at the RCF.