Campuses:
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The Physics student computing lab is located in room 137 of Tate Lab, and the Astronomy computer lab is in room 469B.
Graduate students should find they have accounts set up before they arrive; if not, please check our page on accounts. Physics majors should have accounts created within the first few weeks of the year, though accounts can also be requested via the front office or through SPS.
Remember - you need a Physics account to log in to these systems - your University Internet account will not work.
The computer lab is open to all upper-division undergraduate and pre-qualifier graduate students. Access is currently by a code, which is changed occasionally - Physics department members can find the current code on this web page (login required).
Starting mid-December 2007, we will be changing lab access to use the Ucard card reader. To get on the access list, please update your Physics Directory entry to include your Ucard number: http://www.physics.umn.edu/people/
The lab contains five dual-core Pentium D Linux workstations, each with 2048MB memory.
These can be used for any kind of general computing needs. They contain Mathematica, MatLab, compilers for C, C++ and Fortran, as well as various other programming tools. Microsoft Office is also available on these systems.
Users also have access to the department's computational facilities, of Alpha (Unix) and Linux clusters via the condor batch system.
The lab also contains five Windows systems, each with 1024 Mbytes memory, running Windows XP.
These contain the standard Windows software set for Tate Lab: Microsoft Office, Firefox, Acrobat, Mathematica, etc.