May 4, 2001

End of Year Report

UPSCALE: Undergraduate Physics Student's
Computing and Learning Environment

Department of Physics
University of Toronto

Prepared by David Harrison

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

USAGE

UPSCALE services can be divided into three main categories:

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

1 - Traditional Logins

The following figure and table shows the usage figures via traditional logins.

Bar chart of logins per week

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. The above plot shows the logins per week for the "x" accounts (displayed as solid bars) and "special" accounts (displayed as white bars). The Christmas break accounts for the low numbers in the middle of the academic year.
What 2000=2001 1999-2000 1998-99 1997-98
Active "x" accounts 1424 1794 1940 1792
Active "special" accounts 84 86 116 117
Total student accounts 1508 1880 2056 1909
Number of "x" logins 13,488 18,820 21,499 22,576
Number of "special" logins 6329 5119 5687 12,341
Total logins 19,817 23.939 27,186 34,917
"x" connect hours 6784 8465.8 10,246 9436
"special" connect hours 2110 1772.6 1492 2725
Total connect hours 8894 10,238.4 11,738 11,861

The decline in enrollment in PHY138Y is clearly reflected in the lower numbers for our "x" accounts.

2 - Web Usage

Until this year, the delivery of information via the web has been doubling every year since 1996. This year's usage is basically the same as last year.

Also, 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 accessed by these "home pages" and this access is not "top-level".

What 2000-2001 1999-2000 1998-99 1997-98 1996-97
Html and pdf files delivered 1,194,853 1,075,740 591,164 Not available Not available
Files delivered 3,759,035 2,938,049 1,599,770 834,568 482,046
Percentage delivered in-house 12.6% 11.4% 3.0% 7.4% 36.9%
Total Gigabytes delivered 36.3 28.3 Not available Not available Not available
PHY138Y home page top-level accesses 46,786 47,486 25,579 Not available Not available
JPU200Y home page top-level accesses 3909 3004 1806 Not available Not available
PHY110/138 Laboratory top-level accesses 5119 6822 Not available Not available Not available
I Year Laboratory non-core Guide Sheets. 38,533 3943 Not applicable Not applicable Not applicable
Physics Virtual Bookshelf top-level accesses 5573 2187 659 Not applicable Not applicable
Gigabytes per day

The above plot shows the number of gigabytes per day delivered by our web site from Sept 5, 2000 through May 3, 2001. The large spike at the end of the year occured the day before the final exam in PHY138Y.

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.

Now we also provide simiilar services to the new Physics Specialist laboratory.

Samba Usage
Service 2000-2001 Spring Term, 2000
Connections by "x" accounts 2427 Not Available
Connections by "special" accounts 3587 Not Available
Total connections 6014 4838
Print jobs through the server 3712 750