Steven White at a new Pentium
In April the Instructional Computing Lab received 21 new computers, including 16 state-of-the-art multimedia PCs and 5 Sun Unix workstations. The new computers turn what was an obsolete, marginal facility into an important instructional resource for the Physics Department and the School of Physical Sciences.Sixteen of the new computers are Packard Bell F848 CDT's, 100 MHz Pentium machines each complete with 16 Mb of RAM, 1.3Gb hard disks, quad-speed CDROMs, 17 inch color monitors, and full multimedia capability. Each machine arrived with a number of pre-loaded software packages, such as MicroSoft Windows, Works, Office, Word, and Money; the New Grolier Encyclopedia; and US and World Atlases. The Physics Department has also installed several additional applications for mathematics, graphics, and instructional uses, such as Mathematica and MathCAD. The PCs will be used by Physics and Astronomy majors in Upper Division Department courses. In addition, they will be used in the introductory Astronomy course, and they will be available for use in Chemistry and Math Department courses. They form the largest part of the Instructional Lab.
The five Sun workstations are intended primarily for instruction of graduate students and advanced undergraduates. The systems are Sun 5-70's, each with 16Mb of memory, 17 inch screens, and 530 Mb hard disks. Their operating system is Solaris, Sun Microsystems' version of Unix, an operating system developed by Bell Labs in the early 70's. Although DOS, Windows, and the Macintosh operating system are dominant in the business world, Unix is the most important operating system for scientific research, particularly the numerically intensive research of many physicists. Almost all supercomputers, such as UCI's Convex, use versions of Unix. With the workstations, beginning graduate students, as well as some advanced undergraduates, will learn to use the systems they will likely use in their research.
The upgrade to the Lab cost about $100,000. The money came from a special School of Physical Sciences fund to upgrade instructional computing. The Physics Department's Instructional Computing Committee, chaired at that time by Professor Bill Heidbrink, put together a proposal for the new equipment in late 1994, and approval for the upgrade came in early 1995. The Physical Sciences fund was also used to upgrade the School's Macintosh Lab, which is used mostly by the Chemistry and Math Departments. Substantial contributions to the fund were made by the Office of Academic Computing and by Alumni donations. Professor Herbert Hamber, with help from Professors Steven White and Dennis Silverman, all members of the Instructional Computing Committee, reviewed a variety of systems and picked out the Packard Bell and Sun computer systems. Silverman was also primarily responsible for reviewing software packages for the new machines.
The improved Lab comes at a time when the Department is making a major move to increase the computer content of its undergraduate curriculum. The first change in the curriculum is a new course, which all Physics majors will be required to take, generally in their Sophomore year. Physics 9, Introduction to Computers in Physics, will be a four unit course, offered each Spring quarter. The class will provide an introduction to computers, operating systems, structured programming using Fortran, and symbolic computing using Mathematica. It will be taught for the first time in the Spring of 1996, by Professors White and Hamber. Professor George Lueker from the Department of Information and Computer Science is also helping develop the course. One of the main purposes of the course is to provide Physics majors with sufficient background so that computer assignments can be given in the Upper Division courses. Computers are used extensively in all areas of physics research, as well as in most areas of the economy where physics majors find employment. The Department feels that facility with computers is one the most important skills our majors should learn.
Before the new machines came, the Lab's PC component consisted mostly of 286 machines which were incapable of running Windows, as well as being about two orders of magnitude slower than the new machines. The lack of Windows capability meant that most new software packages could not be installed on the old machines. The Lab's workstation component consisted of five-year-old Hewlett Packard machines, each of which was also about two orders of magnitude less powerful than the new Sun machines.
Although the Lab's new workstations and PCs are rather comparable both in capability and price, the PCs represent top-of-the-line machines compared to other PCs, whereas the workstations are somewhat low-end compared to other Unix machines. The Instructional Computing Committee felt that high-end PCs were necessary to avoid early obsolescence in an era when multimedia capabilities are starting to boom. The Unix workstation market, in contrast to the PC market, is more stable both in hardware and software, and the committee felt that low-end machines would be adequate for instructional purposes for several years.
In addition to the new computers, a new HP Laser printer and an Epson color Inkjet printer were added to the lab.