May 1999
Prepared by David Harrison
UPSCALE provides computational services to undergraduate physics students in three main areas:
As is customary, this report summarises the undergraduate computing facility in the past academic year. We do not report on the active use of the Nortel laboratory by our upper-year students. In the final section, we discuss future directions for UPSCALE.
The following table summarises the delivery of information via the World Wide Web for the past three years. Virtually all of this usage is by our undergraduate students. The phrase "top level" accesses means, for example, when a student accesses the Solutions sub-system from its top-level page; a PHY138Y student might access the relevant part of the sub-system for their course from the PHY138Y home page or from a bookmark, and these accesses are not included.
I also present summaries for three courses which make heavy use of the web to deliver course materials; these courses are PHY100F, PHY138Y and JPU200Y. Almost all of the access to the JPU200Y home page occurred in the second term.
Also, in mid-February we established a Physics Virtual Bookshelf, which is a collection of course materials that we feel may be of interest to a wider audience than just the students in the course for which they were originally prepared; access to the Bookshelf is also summarised below.
What | 1998-99 | 1997-98 | 1996-97 |
Files delivered | 1,599,770 | 834,568 | 482,046 |
Percentage delivered in-house | 3.0% | 7.4% | 36.9% |
Solutions top-level accesses | 22,467 | 18,919 | 19,395 |
Course/Lab home pages top-level accesses | 42,228 | 27,070 | 12,283 |
PHY138Y home page top-level accesses | 27,579 ~ 29/student | Not available | Not available |
PHY100F home page top-level accesses | 1949 ~ 19/student | Not available | Not available |
JPU200Y home page top-level accesses | 1806 ~ 26/student | Not available | Not available |
Physics Virtual Bookshelf top-level accesses | 659 | Not applicable | Not applicable |
The following table shows the usage figures for this year and last year via traditional logins. We have two categories of students accounts: the "x" accounts for first and second year students, and "special" accounts for upper year students.
What | 1998-99 | 1997-98 |
Active "x" accounts | 1940 | 1792 |
Active "special" accounts | 116 | 117 |
Total student accounts | 2056 | 1909 |
Number of "x" logins | 21,499 | 22,576 |
Number of "special" logins | 5687 | 12,341 |
Total logins | 27,186 | 34,917 |
"x" connect hours | 10,246 | 9436 |
"special" connect hours | 1492 | 2725 |
Total connect hours | 11,738 | 11,861 |
Virtually all of the above usage is via our in-house X-terminals. For example, only 579 logins last year were from students dialing in from their homes or elsewhere.
The figure shows the logins per week through the academic year. The
Christmas break (weeks 14 - 17) and Reading Week (week 23) are clearly
visible.
The increase in usage of our web facility doubled again last year. The percentage of students accessing the facility from our own "seats" continues to decline.
As the I Year Laboratory continues to place increased emphasis on using UPSCALE's facilities for data analysis, the logins by these students remains fairly stable. Our upper year students are not logging in as much as previously; presumably they are instead using the web facility and the Nortel laboratory instead.
Our 7 year old web server was struggling to keep up with demand this year. In addition, our coax-based networks occasionally saturated. We have in place a new much faster web server which will be in production by September. In addition, our networks are currently being upgraded to 100 Mbps.
We have observed some pressure on the number of available in-house seats, particularly in the afternoon when many I Year students are trying to analyse their laboratory data. We are actively working on moving our data analysis sub-system to a web format so it is accessible to these students from their homes, residences, etc. We believe this will not only be useful and pleasant for the students, but will also relieve this pressure on our own terminals.