UPSCALE: Undergraduate Physics Students' Computing and Learning Environment

End of Year Report: 2004-2005 Academic Year

Prepared by David Harrison, May 8, 2005

As is customary, this report summarises the usage of the undergraduate computing facility in the past academic year.

UPSCALE services can be divided into three main categories:

  1. Interactive student services via traditional logins. This usage is summarised in the section 1.
  2. Delivery of information and analysis via the web. This usage is summarised in the section 2.
  3. File and print services to PC's. This usage is summarised in section 3.

UPSCALE maintains two types of accounts for undergraduate students, offering somewhat different services. The "x" accounts are given to our first and second year students. The "special" accounts are for upper-year students.

1 - Traditional Logins

Traditional logins are either from our in-house X-terminals or remotely via ssh, ftp or telnet. These are summarised in this section.

The following figure shows the logins per week for the "x" accounts and "special" accounts.

Other aspects of this service are summarised in the following table.

What 2004-2005 2003-2004 2002-2003 2001-2002 2000-2001 1999-2000 1998-99
Active "x" accounts
1914
 1943 1820 1533 1424 1794 1940
Active "special" accounts
156
 142 128 109 84 86 116
Total student accounts
2070
 2085 1948 1642 1508 1880 2056
Number of "x" logins
17,712
 20,001 19,162 15,222 13,488 18,820 21,499
Number of "special" logins
3032
 3855 5381 9067 6329 5119 5687
Total logins
20,744
 23,856 24,543 24,289 19,817 23.939 27,186
"x" connect hours
6932
 7227 8223 6373 6784 8465.8 10,246
"special" connect hours
2364
 1021 1340 2290 2110 1772.6 1492
Total connect hours
9296
 8,248 9563 8663 8894 10,238.4 11,738

2 - Web Usage

In the following table, the phrase "top-level accesses" means access to the html "home page" for a particular sub-system. Certainly some students have bookmarked pages that are accessed by these "home pages" and jumping directly to these pages is not "top-level".

Note that there is a gap in the table between 1996-97 and 2001-2002. This is because including all years makes the table too wide. 1996 was when UPSCALE first began delivering materials via the web.

What 2004-2005 2003-2004 2002-2003 2001-2002 ... 1996-97
Html and pdf files delivered
2,177,431
 1,835,000 1,054,291 1,620,413 ... NA
Files delivered
8,613,662
 7,018,000 5,028,405 5,470,331 ... 482,046
Percentage delivered in-house
5.0%
 6.8% 10.4% 8.5% ... 36.9%
Total Gigabytes delivered
144.9
 101.8 77.1 74.1 ... NA
UPSCALE top-level accesses
54,054
 48,115 48,578 45,776 ... NA
PHY110/138 Lab top-level accesses
7,130
 11,800 6372 6547 ... NA
I Year Laboratory non-core Guide Sheets.
149,403
 195,000 132,817 79,467 ...  
Fits and graphs performed
113,574
 119,000 108,046 73,091 ...  
Physics Virtual Bookshelf top-level accesses
17,218
 14,500 12,718 9189 ...  
Videos (RealMedia and QuickTime)
7,619
 20,500 2566   ...  
Flash animations
423,494
 250,000 62,211   ...  

In the above, entries marked NA are data that are not available. Blank entries mean that the service being summarised was not part of our web site for those years. Also, the "Percentage delivered in-house" only means via our X-terminals, not via a browser on one of our PCs.

The following figure shows the Megabytes per day delivered by our web server.