Your Computing Account: What Large Timesharing Systems are Available?

Faculty & Staff | Undergraduates | Graduates | Dialin Information | Class & Departmental Accounts | Software Chart

Your UO computing account gives you acccess to one or more large timesharing systems. To help you choose the system that best suits your needs, we've described each of them in some detail below

Faculty/Staff [back to top]

Faculty and staff are eligible for accounts on either Darkwing or Oregon, or both.

Darkwing. Darkwing is a large shared Sun Unix system running Solaris 2.7 (Sun's version of Unix). Darkwing is used for email, web browsing and publishing, and scientific/numeric applications. Accounts on Darkwing will also work on the Alphacluster (see "Other Systems," below).

Oregon. Oregon is a large Compaq system running OpenVMS/AXP. OpenVMS/AXP is a unique operating system that is not based on Unix; its commands are actually most reminiscent of MS DOS. It is the same operating system used on the university's administrative computer systems.

For most faculty and staff, either Darkwing or Oregon will work fine for routine email purposes and for serving typical web pages. Beyond that, system choice is primarily a matter of personal preference, as long as the software you want to use is installed on the system you pick (see the software chart on the following page).

If you do establish accounts for yourself on both Darkwing and Oregon, please be sure to routinely check your email on both systems, or forward your email from your less preferred account to your favorite account. Passwords and files are not shared between Darkwing and Oregon.

Undergraduate Students [back to top]

Undergraduate student accounts are automatically created on Gladstone. Gladstone is a large Sun Solaris system and, like Darkwing, it runs Solaris 2.7, Sun's version of Unix. Gladstone accounts can be used for electronic mail and serving personal web pages. This year we also offer an expanded range of academic software on Gladstone, such as SAS and Mathematica. Undergraduate students can also authorize themselves for an Oregon account if they prefer OpenVMS over Unix, or if they simply want a second account to use as a backup.

Graduate Students [back to top]

Graduate students automatically have accounts created for them on Darkwing; however, if they wish, they can also authorize themselves for accounts on Gladstone and Oregon.

Other Systems

You may also see these other systems mentioned from time to time:

Donald and Daisy. Donald and Daisy are large Compaq administrative systems running OpenVMS/AXP. The primary application running on these systems is BANNER, an administrative application environment based on Oracle, a popular large system database. Donald and Daisy share disk, printers and some other resources with Oregon, but access to Donald and Daisy is restricted to staff members who are performing administrative tasks like grade processing and payroll.

Alpha. Alpha is the name for a cluster of five Compaq 500 workstations that run Compaq Tru64 Unix (formerly DEC Unix). Individual members of the Alphacluster have water-related names, such as hotspring, thunderstorm, river, downpour, and geyser.

User directories on Darkwing are exported to the Alpha systems, so you'll see all your files from Darkwing on the Alpha workstations automatically, and any changes you make on either Darkwing or Alpha will automatically be reflected on the other system.

However, because Darkwing runs a different version of Unix than Alpha, (Solaris vs. Tru64 Unix), you cannot compile your program on one system and then run it on the other (i.e., if you want to run your FORTRAN program on Darkwing, compile it on Darkwing and run it on Darkwing).

No mail or web service is provided on the Alphacluster.

Dolly: Dolly is an experimental Beowulf cluster, one of two in the Oregon University System. It consists of eight dual Pentium II nodes connected via a private fast ethernet network to a node controller, and runs the PVM and MPI message passing libraries on top of Redhat Linux.

If you are a faculty member or graduate student interested in gaining access to Dolly to run PVM or MPI codes, please contact Hans Kuhn (hak@darkwing.uoregon.edu) for more information.

What About NT or Novell?

The Computing Center does not currently provide public accounts on any NT- or Novell-based system.

What About Dialin Access? [back to top]

Your account on Oregon, Darkwing or Gladstone enables you to dial in from off campus to the university's modem pool (see related stories on pp. 2-3). Your modem access is for casual use--no more than a few hours a day on average. If you need dedicated or near-dedicated network access, however, you will want to contact a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP). One list of ISPs is available at http://www.thelist.com/

What About Class/Departmental Accounts? [back to top]

If you're teaching an undergraduate class and your students need to access software available only on Darkwing, temporary accounts (so-called "ST" student accounts) can be created for their use. For more information, instructors should contact Connie French, the Computing Center accounts clerk, at 346-1738.

If you're a department or university-recognized institute, lab, or organization, you can arrange for a departmental account. Such accounts are offered solely to provide an authoritative and unchanging home for departmental web pages and official departmental email, and must be officially requested by the person responsible for the account.

Finally, please note that all use of university computing resources is subject to the university's Acceptable Use Policy, which is available in printed format from the Computing Center Documents Room (175 Grayson Hall), or online at http://cc.uoregon.edu/docs/acceptable_use.html