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Dana Roode

Home Access / Modem Plans

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Currently, there are no plans to purchase additional modems or replace existing UCI modems with faster ones. NACS and others have examined these options, but no funding has been identified for modem improvements, and there are other considerations including a rapidly changing home-access market.

In 1995, NACS implemented a number of changes to deal with the frequent busy signals users were encountering on the campus modem pool at that time. These changes were largely successful and got the campus through the 1995/1996 school year. However, each year brings additional network activity, and the congestion has once again been an issue during 1996/1997.

NACS believes that increased use of commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is the best way to meet UCI’s current and future remote access needs. However, NACS will explore the availability of resources to support centrally-funded modem service for UCI faculty, staff and students, whether through on-campus modem pools or ISPs.

NACS will pursue more favorable arrangements with ISPs that the “buying power” of the combined UCI community might allow. NACS will continue to work on resolving network access restriction issues from ISPs. UCI-restricted USENET Newsgroups are now available from ISPs, and a gateway is in the works for restricted Web areas.

NACS looks to commercial providers for the largest piece of the home access solution as ISPs can more effectively provide remote access than can NACS, and with greater functionality. They already offer local phone numbers that provide network access from a variety of local and national locations. Cable TV companies are now offering high-speed access from several southern California locations.

More information about the current remote access situation and plans can be found in the web – seehttp://www.nacs.uci.edu/communication/home-access.html. Additionally, a new LISTSERV mailing list “HOME-ACCESS@UCI.EDU” has been created for future modem, ISP and home access announcements. To add yourself to this list, send a message to LISTSERV@UCI.EDU with “subscribe home-access YOURNAME” in the message body.

Computer Policy Committee

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One of the faculty groups NACS turns to for advice on current issues, as well as for review of short and long range plans, is the Academic Senate Computer Policy Committee (CPC). The CPC meets several times a year to discuss current computing and communications issues. The Chair of the CPC during the Fall and Winter quarters was Anne Friedberg of Film Studies; KJ Lin of Electrical and Computer Engineering is the chair during Spring quarter. CPC members are: Diane Bisom of the UCI Libraries, David Brownstone of Social Sciences, Darin Toohey of Earth System Science, Alexei Maradudin of Physics and Astronomy, Calvin McLaughlin of Biological Chemistry, and Barrie Nault of the Graduate School of Management. The CPC liaison with NACS is Dana Roode.

Upgrade of Convex C3840

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Network & Academic Computing Services will soon upgrade the Convex C3840, the principal NACS numerical computation server, to a Hewlett-Packard Exemplar SPP2000 with 16 CPUs and 2 Gigabytes of memory. The SPP2000 will provide more than ten times the computing performance of the C3840 and will provide a comprehensive parallel computing environment for the first time within NACS for research and educational applications.

Major application software currently on the C3840 will also be available on the SPP2000 including MARC/MENTAT, Gaussian-94, GCG, and IMSL. In addition to these applications and compilers (Fortran90, C and C++), the new machine will have MPI (Message Passing Interface) and PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), two widely used libraries for developing parallel applications based on message-passing. The Global Shared Memory (GSM) model for developing parallel applications is also supported in Fortran90. Assistance from NACS will be available to the current users of the C3840 for migration of their user-developed computer codes to the new machine.

NACS will be offering a variety of workshops and other educational opportunities on parallel computing using the SPP2000 in coming months. Please check the NACS Web page to obtain the latest information about the SPP2000. For additional information, please send e-mail to NACS@UCI.EDU, or contact Donald Frederick of NACS, FREDERIK@UCI.EDU or (949) 824-3200.

Making Lists for UCI Computer Users

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NACS operates UCI’s “LISTSERV” electronic mailing list server that hosts about 400 electronic mailing lists. NACS and other campus parties maintain a number of lists on that server for the benefit computer users and supporters. Those lists are summarized below:

 

Lists for Discussions and Announcements:  
Personal computing:  
Apple Macintosh: uci-mac
IBM’s OS/2 uci-os2
Microsoft Windows 95: uci-win95
Microsoft Windows NT: uci-winnt
Novell networks: uci-novell
cc:mail issues: uci-ccmail
Linux: uci-linux
The World Wide Web: uci-www
UCI Computing Support: ucicscg
   
Lists Just for Announcements:  
Commercial Unix systems:  
Digital Equipment Corp: uci-dec
Silicon Graphics, Inc: uci-sgi
Sun: uci-sun
Scheduled UCI network outages: uci-ops-net
UCI electricity/cooling outages: outages

 

 

For a complete list of UCI mailing lists, send a message to LISTSERV@UCI.EDU with just the word “lists” (no quotes) as its content. To join a mailing list, send a message to LISTSERV@UCI.EDU with “subscribe LISTNAME YOUR-NAME” as its content. For example,

“subscribe uci-mac John Smith”.

Many lists are archived in UCI’s gopher and/or in local USENET Newsgroups.

UCI Newsgroup Now Available via ISPS

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You may now use the UCI news server (news.service.uci.edu) from non-UCI hosts using your UCInetID and password. Among other things, this means you can now access all UCI newsgroups when dialing up from commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Netcom and PacBell. Most news readers have a configuration option for a username and password; enter your UCInetID and password there to gain full UCI Newsgroup access.