UPSCALE: Undergraduate Physics Students' Computing and Learning Environment
End of Year Report: 2003-2004 Academic Year

Prepared by David Harrison, May 1, 2004

As is customary, this report summarises the usage of the undergraduate computing facility in the past academic year.

UPSCALE services can be divided into three main categories:

1. Interactive student services via traditional logins. This usage is summarised in the section 1.
2. Delivery of information and analysis via the web. This usage is summarised in the section 2.
3. File and print services to PC's. This usage is summarised in section 3.

UPSCALE maintains two types of accounts for undergraduate students, offering somewhat different services. The "x" accounts are given to our first and second year students. The "special" accounts are for upper-year students.

1 - Traditional Logins

Traditional logins are either from our in-house X-terminals or remotely via ssh, ftp or telnet. These are summarised in this section.

The following figure shows the logins per week for the "x" accounts and "special" accounts.

Other aspects of this service are summarised in the following table.

2 - Web Usage

In the following table, the phrase "top-level accesses" means access to the html "home page" for a particular sub-system. Certainly some students have bookmarked pages that are accessed by these "home pages" and jumping directly to these pages is not "top-level".

Note that there is a gap in the table between 1996-97 and 2000-2001. This is because including all years makes the table too wide. 1996 was when UPSCALE first began delivering materials via the web.

Also, we are missing the logs for March 13 through April 1, 2004. Thus the numbers below are the raw values multiplied by 1.09, with the exception of the "Percentage deliverered in-house."

In the above, entries marked NA are data that are not available. Blank entries mean that the service being summarised was not part of our web site for those years. Also, the "Percentage delivered in-house" only means via our X-terminals, not via a browser on one of our PCs.

The following figure shows the Megabytes per day delivered by our web server.

In previous years, the graph of megabytes per day showed large spikes corresponding to tests and exams in PHY138Y. Since PHY138 is hosted on helios this year, the megabytes per day delivered by faraday is more uniform.

3 - File and Print Services

We have been providing file and print services to the PC's in the Nortel laboratory for a number of years, although monitoring this usage was difficult until a server upgrade in December 1999. We also provide similar services to the Physics Specialist Laboratory.