May 1998

End of Year Report

UPSCALE: Undergraduate Physics Students'

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.

Summary

In past years UPSCALE has largely delivered computational support for our undergraduate program via our in-house X-terminals and a central UNIX server. Now, an increasing fraction of our services to students are:

1. Delivering information via the World Wide Web.
2. Providing compute, file and print services to our upper year courses, especially via the workstations in the Nortel Applied Physics Laboratory.

Thus, for the first time in recent memory, the usage of our facility via traditional logins is down somewhat from last year. However, this is more than compensated for by the huge increase in activity of our web site and that our upper year students by choice use the Nortel Lab whenever it is available.

Thus, the role of UPSCALE in our undergraduate program is both increasing and changing.

Usage Summary

The following table shows the usage figures for this year and last year via traditional logins. We have two categories of students accounts: the "x" accounts for first and second year students, and "special" accounts for upper year students.

The figure shows the logins per week through the academic year. The Christmas break (weeks 14 - 17) and Reading Week (week 24) are clearly visible.

Our logins by "x" accounts would have probably dropped even more except that the First Year Laboratory has been working very hard to integrate the fitters, graphers, etc. offered by UPSCALE into an increasing number of experiments in that lab.

The following table summarises the delivery of information via the World Wide Web. Virtually of of this usage is to our undergraduate students.

A couple of the more interesting conclusions from the above numbers are:

1. That usage is up dramatically this year, and that the percentage of that usage via the Information Commons, the residences, and students dialing in from home now dominates the facility.
2. The Solutions application has essentially saturated, but the information being provided by individual course and laboratory home pages has more than doubled over last year. The latter is mostly due to the efforts of individualcourse/lab coordinators, and is clearly a big "hit" with their students.

The Future

The major problem facing UPSCALE at present is that the data sub-system, which consists of routines to create and manage data sets, and programs to analyse and transform them, can not be delivered in a fully functional form to remote locations. In particular, only our in-house X-terminals provide a "point and click" user interface and full graphical support. As already mentioned, usage of this sub-system is up dramatically because of efforts by the First Year Laboratory staff to use these tools to increase the quality of the experiments. This has meant that we are still facing increasing pressure on the number of "seats" that we can make available.

The solution is fairly clear. If we can convert the data sub-system to World Wide Web format, we can anticipate increasing numbers of students doing their data analysis remotely. This conversion will be far from trivial. We are actively seeking funding to achieve this goal.