Accomplishments
Next Quarter Plans
Contacts
Equipment Utilization
Feedback and Problems

Accomplishments

We have exercised the systems by teaching one unit of Physics 683. This particular unit, Electronic Structure: the Local Density Approximation, was taught by Professor Michael Teter and was developed under Linux.

Next Quarter Plans

We intend to refine the Linux and Windows NT systems. We plan to remove all dependency on the old Sun workstations. We will be installing more software applications including Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab. The Intel systems should serve all the computing needs of the incoming graduate students before they commit themselves to individual research groups for thesis work. Our services will be primarily aimed at providing state of the art instructional computing, which for physics graduate students can readily reach the realm of contemporary physics research computing. Finally, we hope to get a 100Mb link to the campus backbone in the next quarter or the following quarter.

Contacts

Carl Franck, Associate Professor, Physics Department
Ralph B. Robinson, Programmer Analyst, Physics Department
Stephen Rinehart, Graduate Student/System Administrator, Physics Department

Equipment Utilization

Mr. Ralph B. Robinson and Mr. Stephen Rinehart of the Cornell Physics Department have set up our entire complement of computers:  eight single processor workstations. All the workstations are connected at 100Mb using our Intel 510T switch. We have also provided an HP LaserJet 4000 TN printer for the network. We have installed Windows NT and Linux on all the systems. We are using Drive Image Professional from PowerQuest corporation to provide dual boot capability for the workstations. We currently have one system acting as an NT server, and one system acting as a Linux NFS server. We intend to run half the machines with NT and half with Linux normally. The dual boot capability provides us with the option of switching seven out of the eight machines to NT or Linux at short notice.

Our intended users are the three newest classes of physics doctoral students, approximately 70 persons, and professors who wish to use the system for teaching. Students have begun to use the system.

Feedback

We had two difficulties in setting up the facility. Six of the machines were SCSI systems provided by Dell. Unfortunately, Dell insists on providing SCSI CD-ROM drives in systems with SCSI hard disks. This causes problems if one desires to connect SCSI devices to the external SCSI connector on the systems. The second difficulty was installing software on the systems without running the installer for each piece of software on each machine. That would have been a very time consuming task. We wanted to install all the software on one machine, and then clone that machine using the Drive Image Professional program from PowerQuest. While this worked, there were many difficulties in the process.