Machines

The CUED Teaching System is a collection of about 20 Hewlett Packard machines based on HP-UX (a version of the Unix operating system). Unix was chosen because, as well as being able to support the running of the big application necessary in engineering, the system is flexible, scalable and easily maintained. These server machines provide access (from colleges as well as departmental terminals) to a large range of software. Installation of this wide a range on individual machines in colleges wouldn't be practical.

The system is developed by an annual program of enhancement and replacement of obsolescent equipement. This development is overseen by the Computer Systems Committee and based on an annual review document produced by the Computer Officers. The complete infrastructure computing budget is roughly £200,000 per annum of which over half is directly attributable to teaching, the rest covering networking and infrastructure support for research.

The main machines are as follows

• rasp is our main file server - the discs containing 32 gigabytes of user files and 10 gigabytes of applications are physically attached to it.
• tw1, tw2... tw9 are our main compute-servers (HP 9000/700 series machines). They have their own system discs. Each has about a dozen terminals attached to it forming a cluster.
• spanner is our main infrastructure machine. It deals with mail and provides various services that need to be available at all times to the system (WWW services, application licensing nameserver facilities, etc).
• club and punch are general purpose machines.
• twg01, twg02 ... twg13 each have a large high-resolution monitor attached to them. They are intended for single rather than multi-user use, providing suitable performance for running Computer Aided Design (CAD) software.

All of these machines (except the graphics workstations) are located in the machine room at the west end of the Design and Project Office. The terminals (some of which are Xterminals, some PCs) are at 3 main locations -

Design and Project Office:

Over 80 terminals on 6 clusters. 10 stand-alone graphics machines.

Speech Laboratory:

16 terminals on 2 clusters.

South Wing Basement:

16 terminals on 1 cluster. 3 stand-alone graphics machines.

We have adapted some freely available source code to produce a friendly user interface powerful enough for the general user, but customisable enough to be adapted for particular courses. The extensive per-user customisation available has been used to benefit wheelchair-bound users and users with impaired vision.

We aim to give users easy access to the many and varied facilities available. We will shortly add an NT server capable of serving Windows-based applications to the same X terminals.