The Computer Centre provides digital computing and communication facilities for administrative, teaching and research use throughout the university. There are centres at the Berwick, Clayton, Caulfield, Peninsula, Parkville and Gippsland campuses, and a network of personal computers and workstations, embracing all campuses as well as medical departments located in teaching hospitals.
Access is available to several Alpha and VAX/VMS computers, with separate clusters for administration, research and teaching. Pyramid, DEC and IBM RS6000 systems provide time-shared UNIX environments. Researchers can also use the DEC MP/2 massively parallel computer, which has 4096 processors, 256 Mbytes of memory and a parallel access disk store with a capacity of 5Gbytes.
Library staff and users are served by a Unisys 2200 series computer running the PALS library system which includes on-line catalogue, circulation, acquisitions, periodicals, and reserve book management. These services have been extended to cover branch libraries on all campuses.
VMS and UNIX are the operating systems supported on the time-sharing computers, and on personal computers MS-DOS and Windows predominate. Fortran, BASIC, COBOL, Pascal, Ada, Lisp and C are some of the compilers which are available, as well as a wide range of mathematics, statistics and graphics libraries, and several database products.
The Berwick campus is being established as a high-technology campus. Facilities will include for student use four computer laboratories holding a total of seventy PCs, lecture theatres that will allow for teaching by interactive television, video-conferencing facilities, and a desktop video-conferencing computer laboratory.
The Clayton undergraduate computing laboratory houses about 200 personal computer workstations (IBM-compatible), as well as sixty UNIX workstations (DECstation). During semester the Clayton centre is open until 11 pm Monday to Friday, and from 9 am to 4 pm on Saturday and Sunday. The centre also maintains numerous PC laboratories in teaching departments.
At Caulfield campus the centre has twenty-four PC laboratories with 420 PCs and twelve Silicon Graphics workstations. Some laboratories are available only for class bookings. PCs for casual use are available in E, F and K blocks between the hours of 8.30 am and 10.30 pm Monday to Friday and 9 am to 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday during semester. There are five PC laboratories at the Peninsula campus. Services are available from 9 am to 9 pm Monday to Thursday, 9 am to 5 pm Friday, and 1 pm to 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday.
At Gippsland campus there are Hewlett-Packard 3000, Hewlett-Packard 9000 and DEC computers for time-sharing use, and seven laboratories with PCs. Staff and students at Gippsland can also access computers at the metropolitan campuses. Computers at Gippsland can also be reached from workstations at the metropolitan campuses.
Installation, administration and maintenance of computer networks in and between campuses is also a Computer Centre responsibility. The three larger campuses are connected by private wideband microwave links which carry both voice and data. Wideband Telecom links connect Gippsland and Parkville campuses with the Monash network. Within each campus departmental computers and workstations are connected to local networks served by an optical fibre backbone which enables communication with other departments and with shared Computer Centre mainframes. The university data network also connects to the Australian Academic Research Network (AARNet), which gives access to mail, news and computing services throughout Australia and to the worldwide Internet network.
Video conference facilities are available at Gippsland, Peninsula, Caulfield and Clayton campuses, permitting conferences within Monash using the private network, and with other organisations both within Australia and overseas via Telecom ISDN dial-up connections.
At most campuses the Computer Centre houses a resource centre which includes facilities for scanning documents, as well as specialised printers, plotters and graphic terminals. There are also services available for copying files to and from a wide range of media, and in many formats.
The centre offers a wide range of short courses designed to support both student and academic needs.
Assistance is available through a help desk which can be reached on internal extension 66777 (all campuses except Parkville), or by email addressed to helpdesk@cc.monash.edu.au. Your problem is automatically recorded and has a number assigned to it, and you will be further notified about the progress of the call.
More comprehensive and up to date information on Computer Centre facilities and services is available on the Campus Wide Information Service (CWIS) or on the World Wide Web, and can be found by pointing your browser at http://www.monash.edu.au/cc
Telephone inquiries concerning Computer Centre facilities or services should be directed to:
BER
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9905
4000
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| CAU
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9903
2777
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| CLA
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9905
1777
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| GIP
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9902
6777
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| PAR
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9903
9777
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| PFR
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9904
4777
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| Published by Monash University, Clayton, Victoria
3168 Copyright © Monash University 1996 - All Rights Reserved - Caution Authorised by the Academic Registrar December 1996 |