Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

You are here: Home / Archives for About NACS

About NACS

New ECE Computing Lab

by

Recently NACS helped the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) assemble a new computing lab for ECE majors.

The Computer Science and Engineering Instructional Laboratory comprises 32 “SunRay Appliance” Unix workstations and a four-processor server. The lab will also include a station running NACS’s PayPrint service for student printing. The creation of the new lab was driven by record enrollments in ECE and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering. The new facility will serve both as an instructional lab and a drop-in homework lab.

30 of the workstations are Sun Microsystems SunRay 100’s for student use. The other two are SunRay 1’s for use as teaching aids which can be connected to overhead projectors.

The SunRay appliances were selected for the lab because ECE found these systems allowed much lower per-seat administration costs than other options.

ECE and NACS wish to acknowledge a generous contribution from Sun Microsystems, which helped make the new lab possible.

Broadcast E-mail to Students

by

With the support of the UCI Registrar, Network & Academic Computing Services provides a service to facilitate the distribution of academic information to large sets of UCI students. The “Student Electronic Broadcast System” (SEBS) provides mailing lists and delivery mechanisms to reach various categories of students.

With SEBS, authorized personnel can send e-mail to all students within a major, all students within a year (e.g. all sophomores), and several other useful categories. Lists are dynamically maintained using official UCI Registrar enrollment data so that schools and departments do not have to maintain and update their own lists.

The broadcast system was developed based on input from the campus, to meet academic information dissemination needs. More information can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/sebs/

Web Hosting Service

by

For the many faculty and staff who wish to develop Web sites, NACS offers computers and services to augment existing school and department resources. NACS has both Linux and Windows servers, in order to accommodate most Web development needs.

The machines are configured so that Web sites can be developed and maintained by the faculty/staff sponsor, by NACS staff, or cooperatively. A variety of Web server and Web development tools are available, native to either environment. The hosting service is economical, because several departments share the cost of acquiring and maintaining a single machine.

An on-staff Web developer is also available who is skilled in a wide array of Web technologies, including Perl, PHP, ASP and SQL.

More information can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/webdev.html

Some recent sites which NACS has hosted and/or supported development:

Campuswide Honors program
http://www.honors.uci.edu/
Student Fee Advisory Committee
http://www.sfac.uci.edu/
Sexual Assault Survivors Alliance
http://www.sexualassaultsurvivors.org/

New Staff

by

Tony Soeller joined NACS on May 30, 2000 to enhance campus support for research and scientific computing. Tony has a B.S. degree in Geology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an M.S. degree in Geology from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Tony is skilled in a wide range of programming languages and has extensive experience with 2-D and 3-D visualization applications. Tony is equally capable with UNIX, PC, and Mac computing platforms.

Previously, Tony has held management positions at a number of companies and academic institutions, including the Geographical Information Systems Laboratory at Caltech. Please feel free to call Tony at 824-3239 to discuss research computing needs.

New Name

by

Effective July 1, 2000, OAC has a new name: NACS – Network and Academic Computing Services

We feel NACS best represents the areas of our primary emphasis:

Network:
The network is a major component of what we do, with all of our services being heavily dependent on network technology, even those sometimes labeled “computing services.” The telephone system is a network as well, and the expectation is that it will be come increasingly integrated with the data network in the future.
Academic Computing:
We provide a wide range of services to users of computing at UCI, and our primary computing focus is serving UCI’s research and education mission. The phrase “academic computing” has served us well, properly distinguishing our role from that of Administrative Computing (AdCom) Services.
Services:
It’s what we do! NACS’s mission is to provide services to campus departments by creating and maintaining a computing and electronic communication environment that meets the needs of the campus.