CS 740 Color Alpha Systems

For the course labs and programming assignments, you will be using the "color machines", a collection of 10 Alpha workstations donated to the ECE department by Digital Equipment Corp (thanks to Dave Nagle in ECE). The ECE department generously shares these workstations with us. Each workstation has a 433MHz 21164 Alpha processor with 128 MB of main memory.

The color machines are listed below. Please note that we will be using only the "black cluster", whose lead machine is black.ece.

Please use ssh to log into these machines in a secure fashion (e.g., ssh XXX.ece.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!

Black 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. Mowry (tcm@cs.cmu.edu).

The color 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 ece.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 file is copied from the lead machine in cluster machine to all others in that cluster each night. So if you make a change to your default shell, etc you need to make that change on both black and maroon.

Password changes should be made using the kpasswd command and they will take effect immediatly on all machines in the group.

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.

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