Computing @ the MIT Math Department

Welcome to the MIT Math Department's Computer Facilities!

This page will attempt to get you started using the Math Department's computer systems. Most offices have computers. If your office doesn't have a computer you can find computers in one of the 4 computer labs located in the following rooms: 2-168, 2-268, 2-366, and 2-386.

Topics we will cover in this document are:

1. Introduction to the Math Department Computing Environment.
2. Email.
3. Description of Commonly Used Programs.
4. Printing.
5. Dialup/Remote Access.
6. Laptops.

Introduction to the Math Department Computing Environment.

Generally, each faculty member or graduate student will have a Linux workstation available for use in his or her office or a nearby computer room.

Linux workstations currently run the Red Hat Enterprise 4 Linux operating system with the GNOME Desktop set as the default desktop environment. Once you type in your username and password you are presented with a graphical user environment that is similar to other commercial operating systems. From GNOME, users have access to many commonly used programs. Emacs, Pine, Matlab, and Mathematica to name a few. To begin, click on the red hat icon in the lower left hand corner and navigate to the "MIT Math Department Applications" menu. Within this menu you will find programs that fill most users' needs. There are also taskbar shortcuts at the bottom of the screen. These include: Mozilla, OpenOffice applications, as well as a Terminal shortcut.

Users can login to any Linux workstation in the department using their username and password. Your files are stored on a central fileserver and are available from all machines. As we are primarily a Unix type environment the following Unix tutorial might be useful:

UNIX_In_90_Minutes.html

Currently, computers on the public network are limited to Linux workstations. We do not allow personal Windows or Mac OS machines on the public network.

Email

The most commonly used application for reading and sending e-mail in the Math Department is pine. Simply type "pine" from any terminal window or select it from the Math Department Menu in GNOME. The main pine menu is navigated with the arrow keys and by pressing enter to confirm your selection. When reading your e-mail, appropriate commands are listed at the bottom of the screen. When composing messages, the commands listed at the bottom are preceded by a caret "^", which means you hold the control key then press the appropriate letter.

We maintain a web page here that has details for all aspects of dealing with your email.

Description of Commonly Used Programs

On any of the Math Department machines you will find these generally used programs available:

Email:

Pine and Thunderbird

Web Access:

Mozilla and Opera

Text Editors:

Xemacs, emacs, vim, and nedit

Document Typesetting/Processing:

LaTeX, kile, dvips, ps2pdf

Compilers:

gcc, lf95 (Lahey Fortran 95 Compiler with IMSL)

Document Display:

for PDF: acroread (Acrobat Reader), for PostScript: ggv, for DVI: xdvi

OpenOffice is installed for reading and editing of Microsoft Word and Excel documents. Simply click on the appropriate launcher on the toolbar.

There is also a web page with a table listing the programs available by function at:

http://www-math.mit.edu/computer_help/programs.html

We also have the following specialized programs available:

1. Maple 10
2. Mathematica 5
3. Matlab 7 (Release 14)
4. Splus 6

While you are able to use these programs on the Linux workstations, it is recommended that you run more computationally intense jobs on one of our compute hosts. The compute hosts have increased memory and multiple CPUs.

The compute hosts are:

hypatia

A Dell PowerEdge 4600 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 with dual 3GHz Intel Xeon CPUs and 4GB of RAM

newton

An Intel server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 with dual 1.2GHz AMD MP CPUs and 2GB of RAM

schauder

A Sun Blade 1000 running Solaris 10 with dual 750MHz UltraSparc III CPUs and 2GB of RAM

If you find that these compute hosts do not meet your needs, there is also a 32-processor Beowulf cluster (16 dual-processor Athlon MP 2000+, each has 1.67 GHz CPU and 1 GB memory). Please note while the cluster is not available for general use (it being a specialized machine for joint use between Applied Mathematics and Materials Science) you may request an account on the machine by emailing help@math.mit.edu, which will create a trouble ticket for the request, after reading the general usage policy found on the following web page:

http://www-math.mit.edu/computer_help/cluster_policy.html

Multimedia

The Linux workstations have a CD-ROM drive and on-board sound. From the GNOME red hat menu you can find various applications for playing CDs and other multimedia type files. There is a tower Dell system in each computer lab. These systems are equipped with a DVD reader / CD re(write) drive. To play DVDs use mplayer. Please note that due to resource limitations no support will be given for these types of programs.

There is a scanner available for general use in 2-386 connected to a Mac. Instructions are attached to the lid of the scanner.

If you should need a work/research-related program installed please contact: help@math.mit.edu.

There is a mailing list (software@math.mit.edu) where announcements regarding new programs installed or upgraded will be made, to become a member of this list, contact help@math.mit.edu

Printing

There are generally two printers located on each floor. In addition to the black and white printers, there is a color printer in 2-366. Detailed information on printing can be found here:

http://math.mit.edu/computer_help/printing.html

Dial-Up/Remote Access

The Math Department provides fourteen 33.6 kbps dial-up modems to provide Math Department users with access to our network as well as the Internet from home and/or a remote location. Detailed instructions for setting up your home computer to dial-up to the Math Department can be found at the following web page:

http://www-math.mit.edu/computer_help/dialup.html

To connect to a Math Department machine outside of the department you must use SSH. You may SSH to following login servers: lagrange.mit.edu, laurent.mit.edu, and lebesgue.mit.edu SSH stands for Secure SHell. It is intended as a secure replacement for telnet, rsh, rlogin, as well as ftp. Scp or sftp must be used in place of ftp for file transfers. If you need a copy of SSH for a Windows PC at home, contact: help@math.mit.edu. Linux and Mac OS X operating systems come standard with SSH. For a more detailed description of SSH, sftp and scp as well was example of how to use these commands, please visit the following web page:

http://www-math.mit.edu/computer_help/faq/unix/secureshell.html

On the above web page you will also find a link for a web-based ssh client that will allow you to connect to the department from any machine in the world that has a fairly recent web browser.

Laptops

What kind of connectivity is provided for laptops?

Laptop users are required to use the wireless network. For security reasons, laptops are not able to plug into the wired network.

What will I need in order to connect?

Users wishing to get their laptops connected to the wireless network are required to have wireless network support. At this time we are recommending people use MIT's Wireless network. Once you initially connect to their wireless network, start up a web browser so you can register for continued use. More details can be found on MIT's Wireless Page (You'll want to register using Option B - without an IP address

What is supported?

We will provide you with assistance in getting your laptop connected to the wireless network. This includes: recommending wireless cards for purchase, installing drivers if necessary, and configuration of your laptop to access MIT's wireless network. Also, if you are unfamiliar with transferring files between your laptop and Math Department servers, we will help you learn how to do this.

The currently supported platforms for laptops are Windows 2000/XP as well as Mac OS 10.2 or greater. We do not provide support for Linux laptops at this time.

What is not supported?

We expect that people will do the bulk of their work on Math Department workstations. For this reason, and because we have limited resources, we do not provide application support for people using laptops or workstations not provided by the department. We also do not support printing from laptops. If you need to print, please transfer your file to your Math account and print it from there.

If you have any questions regarding laptops or laptop policy contact: help@math.mit.edu