Alpha Systems

For the course labs and programming assignments, you will be using a collection of 3 Alpha workstations. Each workstation is equipped with a 433MHz 21164A (EV5.6) Alpha processor with 256 MB of main memory running Digital Unix/OSF1 V4.0D 878.

The alpha machines are listed below.

Please use ssh to log into these machines in a secure fashion (e.g., ssh XXX.sp.cs.cmu.edu -l username, where XXX is a machine name and username is your login id). Note that encrypted telnet does not work; if you try to telnet to one of these machines, you will be sending your password in the clear, so don't do it!

Alpha Cluster

Notes

Every student should have an account that will work on any of the machines. If you have a problem with your account, please send mail to Prof. Goldstein (seth@cs.cmu.edu).

The alpha machines can be reached remotely via any internet connection. They live off in some machine room and don't even have consoles. They can act as X window clients, however, so you can treat them the same way as the Andrew Unix servers, (except that they're a lot faster. :)

These machines work from an AFS account set up for you in domain cs.cmu.edu. You can navigate between this account and your andrew account using standard AFS operations. You can use klog to authenticate yourself from one domain to another.

The password is the same as your andrew password.

Alpha Documentation

Our own Alpha Assembly Language guide and lecture notes will give you all the details about Alpha assembly language. However, interested students may also want to reference the documentation from DEC (now part of HP).