September 1999 - Summer 1999 System Update Information

• We are happy to announce the addition of Scott Franzitta and Lynne Crohn to the CSG staff. Scott (LH430E, sfranzit@cs.indiana.edu) is taking over the duties of webmaster and unix accounts administrator and will be performing a wide variety of other system administration duties. Lynne Crohn is scheduled to start on September 20th and will be our new PC Support Specialist.

• The 11 Suns in the Burrow cluster (LH004) have been upgraded to new Sun Ultra 5s and Ultra 10s with a combination of 21" and 19" monitors. These machines are available for use by any CS student and for non-CS students that are taking CS classes that use these machines.

• In addition to the Burrow Suns, we have installed about 15 other new Sun Ultra workstations in various locations. The majority of these machines are for general graduate student use and are located in LH125, LH130, and various other shared graduate student offices.

• The C335 (Computer Structures) lab in LH035 has been completely rebuilt for the Fall 1999 semester. The lab now consists of 20 PCs connected to special-purpose Motorola 68040 hardware utilizing the SDS Single-Step commercial 68K programming development tools.

• The B441 (Digital Design) lab in LH008 has been upgraded for the Fall 1999 semester. The lab now has 9 new PCs that allow students to work with state-of-the-art FPGA design tools (Xilinx Foundation 1.5i). The lab's hardware has also been augmented with FPGA and CPLD project boards through a grant from Xilinx.

• The 10 PCs and 6 Macs in LH112, LH016, and LH201H used to support the A-suite AIs and faculty have been upgraded. The PCs are now AMD K6-2/350s and the Macs are 350MHz G3s.

• Two of our main Sun Unix servers have been upgraded. Whale is the primary file and mail server and it has been upgraded to a multi-processor Sun E250 with a 125GB RAID disk array for graduate student home directories. At some point before the end of September, all active graduate students will receive a substantial disk quota increase. In addition, the department backup server, megamouth, has been upgraded to a 2 processor Sun Ultra 60. So, when you accidentally remove your thesis we can pull it off of backup tapes even more quickly than we have been able to do in the past.

• Numerous software systems have been installed and upgraded over the summer. This includes the Java Development Kit, KDE, Star Office, and Dr Scheme. Please see the Software Database for more information about the available software.

• The PCs used by the administrative staff in the main office are also being upgraded to AMD K6-2/350s. To date, 4 machines have been upgraded with 6 more upgrades planned before the end of September.

• The electronic teaching lab in LH115 has also undergone some improvements. All 25 PCs were upgraded with larger hard drives and the new LCD projector has replaced the old Electrohome projector. A VCR has also been installed in the instructor's podium and the sound output from the VCR and Sun drive the speakers built into the projector.

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