The Department's computing facilities support undergraduate education as well as research and administration.
Student Accounts
All students enrolled in computer science classes are entitled, at the instructor's request, to an account on the department's systems. With each account, students get a new email address (in addition to their university email address), and access to most computer services offered by the department.
Course Software
Any software found on the system is available for instructors, TAs and students to use, but please pay attention to support issues. If you use a contrib project (or an old /cs one) in a course, let the project owners know you are using it. Having a TA become a co-owner of a critical contrib project is a good strategy.
The technical staff is available to help locate, acquire, install and maintain software for use by courses. This applies to free software, shareware and commercial software. It is best to get your request in early - please try to think a semester ahead.
Course Directory
Each CS course may have a course directory. These are located at /course/csxxx. This is the place for course-specific scripts, software, slides and other course materials.
Course Group Permissions
Each CS course may have a course, course-hta, or course-ta group. These are used to mediate access to course materials, usually located in the course directory. The course group is named for the course (e.g. cs-015student), and the students, TAs and instructor can be members. The course-ta group (e.g. cs-015ta) has only the instructor and TAs as members.
Course Web Page
Each CS course may have a web page hosted on the CS Department's web server. The web pages are located under the courses top-level web directory. There is more information about authoring and maintaining web pages elsewhere in this web.
The Sunlab
The sunlab is the primary work space for CS undergraduate students. It is a banked auditorium equipped with 78 computer workstations running debian linux. The sunlab is also the primary computing cluster resource for students in computer science classes, and has its own web page with more information on all these topics.
The Mlab
The mlab is the CS Department's Mac/Linux lab which houses 33 macOS bigSur and 29 linuxworkstations running debian. The Mlab is used mostly by students enrolled in introductory Computer Science classes and TAs teaching sections for those classes. It also has its own web page which lists reservations and the hours it is open.
Special Requests
The technical staff is available to help with special requests of all kinds. We can help with software or hardware needs, allocate system resources (disk space, cpu cycles, etc.), and more.
The Computer Science Department has a long history of innovation in the use of computing systems in education. The tstaff is especially sensitive to this, and willing to work with educators interested in new or proven ways to utilize technology in the classroom.
