CS 213 Colour Alpha Systems

For the course labs and programming assignments, you will be using the "colour machines", a collection of 20 Alpha workstations donated to the Dave Nagle and the ECE department by Digital Equipment Corp. The ECE department generously shares these workstations with us. Each workstation has a 433MHz 21164 Alpha processor with 128 MB of main memory.

The colour machines are listed below. Please note that the colour machines actually consist of two clusters: The "black cluster", whose lead machine is black.ece, and the "maroon cluster", whose lead machine is maroon.ece. The maroon cluster is connected by a private ethernet that we will use in Lab 4.

You can click on any of the following machine IDs to establish a telnet session. If you want to run any X window applications, you should also execute the command xhost XXX.ece.cmu.edu on you local machine, where XXX is the name of the machine to which you connected.

Black Cluster

Maroon Cluster (with private ethernet)

Notes

Every student should have an account that will work on any of the machines. If you have a problem with your account, please send mail to Prof. O'Hallaron (droh@cs.cmu.edu).

The colour machines can be reached remotely via any internet connection. They live off in some machine room and don't even have consoles. They can act as X window clients, however, so you can treat them the same way as the Andrew Unix servers, (except that they're a lot faster. :)

These machines work from an AFS account set up for you in domain ece.cmu.edu. You can navigate between this account and your andrew account using standard AFS operations. You can use klog to authenticate yourself from one domain to another.

The password file is copied from the lead machine in cluster machine to all others in that cluster each night. So if you make a change to your default shell, etc you need to make that change on both black and maroon.

Password changes should be made using the kpasswd command and they will take effect immediatly on all machines in the group.

Alpha Documentation

Our own Alpha Assembly Language guide and lecture notes will give you all the details about Alpha assembly language. However, interested students may also want to reference the documentation from DEC.