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 Physics undergraduate and graduate students who are paying the IT Technology Fee.

Access to the lab is by a 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/edit_dirinfo_form.html

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.

• Please don't reset or restart a workstation - someone may have jobs running on it, or be using it from another location.
• If you're going to run a cpu-intensive job, use condor so your job can run efficiently without affecting interactive users.
• Don't lock the screen and leave for long periods. If a workstation screen is locked, and someone wants to use it, we will reset your session.

Users also have access to the department's computational facilities, of Alpha (Unix) and Linux clusters via the condor batch system.

• More about UNIX and Linux at Tate Lab

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.

• More about Windows at Tate Lab