College of Computing

The College of Computing has a number of remotely accessible machines (located in the CoC Machine Room, CCB 247) that are available for general use by faculty, staff and graduate students, some with fairly substantial computational capacity. The following table lists these remotely accessible systems, all of which are available to be your CoC mail-home. Please observe suggestions and restrictions regarding the appropriate uses of these machines. If you plan to do work that will tax the system resources (compute cycles, disk space, etc.), please coordinate this with the TSO staff beforehand. Any changes with respect to machine availability will be announced via news posting to git.cc.systems or via e-mail, depending on the urgency of the information.

General Access Servers

CoC Academic Computing Servers

Graduate Student Cubicles

Every attempt is made to provide each Ph.D. students desk with a computer providing a 17-inch color display with Web browsing and X Windows capability for access to College and Internet resources. If this is not possible, then the allocation scheme provided by the Deans Faculty Advisory Committee (DAC) is used, which calls for preference to be given to those Ph.D. students closest to completion who do not otherwise have easy access to a workstation through a lab affiliation (e.g. GVU, Systems).

Depending on availability, the computers currently provided for this purpose are Intel PCs running Red Hat Linux, Sun SunRays, and Sun SPARCstations running Solaris 8. A number of trade-offs had to be made in order to stay within available resources, and these decisions were made based on prior input from graduate students. As a result, use of the local compute power, while advantageous, is a secondary benefit and of a lower priority; the names of the systems are all pre-chosen (trees) and addresses allocated; and no files, including mail boxes, should be kept locally, as we do not have the capacity to perform backups on these systems. It is important to keep the systems as generic as possible in order to avoid overwhelming our ability to keep them working, so no individual customizations and local software installs are possible. You can inquire about a desktop change by sending a request to helpdesk@cc.gatech.edu and we will see what can be done.

You should always make sure you save your editor buffers and mailboxes before you leave your computer. Even though CoC workstations and servers are often up for weeks or months, there is no use taking the chance tonight might be the unlucky one when we have a power failure or system crash. Likewise, long-running computations are best run on servers set aside for that purpose rather than workstations which may be rebooted out from under you.

Office of Information Technology (OIT)

Using your OIT (PRISM) account, there are additional facilities available to you as a member of the Georgia Tech community. It should be remembered that usage of all multi-user OIT facilities is tracked and charged against an individual allocation and ultimately, the Colleges yearly alloca-tion (see OIT (PRISM) Accounts in the section entitled Computer Accounts). The general access facilities of interest include:

As indicated, acme actually refers to several systems. When connecting to it, you will be assigned to one of the systems in a fashion this is supposed to spread the load among the available machines. See the section on Instructional Labs for information on additional College and OIT facilities which are generally accessible, secondary to their primary purpose of supporting instruction.

Georgia Tech Electronic Library (GTEL)

All Georgia Tech faculty, staff, and students have access to GTEL, the Georgia Tech Electronic Library. From GTEL, you can search the Georgia Tech and Georgia State University library catalogs as well as a number of very useful databases, including an excellent corporate profile database and a variety of citation databases for periodicals. GTEL is available via http://www.library.gatech.edu/. You will be required to provide your 9-digit student or employee ID number and a 6-character GTEL password (new users are prompted to set up a GTEL password) in order to gain access.

There is also a text-only screen-oriented interface to GTEL, which can be accessed by simply using the telnet program to connect to the system gtel.gatech.edu. At the login: prompt, you type library, and you will then be asked to provide your ID number and password, as described above. The menu interface to GTEL is quite usable without additional documentation, but documentation and training is available from Price Gilbert Memorial Library. If you have problems with logging in (e.g. you have forgotten your GTEL password) or with using GTEL, assistance is available from the Library Reference Department at 894-4529. Please note that students not registered for a given semester (such as co-ops) must make special arrangements with the Library Reference Department in order to retain access; normally, the Library removes access privileges for anyone not on active status as student or employee, due to software licensing restrictions.