The departmental servers are working fine after the updates.
Major coxeter update at 2:00pm on Wednesday August 14, 2013
August 9, 2013 by
Starting at approximately 2:00pm on Wednesday, Aug 14 we will be upgrading coxeter‘s hardware and software. The most noticeable change for users who use the coxeter GUI directly is that the only supported desktop environment is KDE4 which looks somewhat different than the KDE3 version from before. Please see: http://www.math.toronto.edu/admin/coxeter-upgrade.html for more detailed information about this upgrade.
We expect that coxeter will be back up around 5:00pm if there are no unforeseen problems. Please let us know (at requests@math.toronto.edu) if you have any problems with or questions about the new coxeter.
Software updates at 3:45pm on Wednesday August 14, 2013
August 9, 2013 by
The departmental server sphere, and the mail, web, share, ptr, and blog/wiki servers will have software updates applied this Wednesday afternoon, August 14, 2013 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 3:45pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 4:30pm.
Another phishing email
July 26, 2013 by
A phishing email with
Subject: ***Math.toronto.edu Incoming EMails Pending***
and claiming to come
From: ITHelpDesk@math.toronto.edu <rwyker1@cogeco.ca>
has been sent to the department.
Please delete it, it is spam.
New wireless laser pointer for the Seminar Room (BA6183)
July 22, 2013 by
A Kensington Wireless Presenter Pro with Green Laser Pointer in now in a small black carrying case in the drawer beneath the computer in the Seminar Room (BA6183). The USB wireless receiver is stored inside the pointer (on the top near the back; there is a small indentation for pulling it out with one’s finger). Please be careful with the receiver when plugging it into computers; if it breaks then the pointer will be much less useful.
This pointer has an on/off switch on the side and four buttons. The top button is for the laser pointer, the left for Previous, the right for Next, and the bottom is supposed to turn the screen off, but this doesn’t always work.
(Image from the publicly available Instruction Guide for the pointer. If Kensington has any copyright concerns about this image then please let us know and it will be removed.)
Currently there is information about this pointer on the Kensington website at this URL. As always with any laser, do not stare into the beam or shine the light into other people’s eyes.
New sphere
July 11, 2013 by
The update of hardware for sphere went smoothly. The new machine is faster and we have installed the latest versions of:
- Magma (version V2.19-7); type magma to run it
- Mathematica (version 9.0.1); type math (CLI) or mathematica (GUI) to run it
- Matlab (version R2013a); type matlab to run it
As mentioned before we are negotiating to get the newest version of Maple as well.
There is some free mathematical software on sphere as well:
- Asymptote, a powerful descriptive vector graphics language; type asy (CLI) or xasy (GUI) to run it
- Axiom, a general purpose computer algebra system; type axiom to run it
- Macaulay2, a software system devoted to supporting research in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra; type M2 to run it
- Sage, a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL which combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface and whose mission is to create a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab; type sage to run it
The new sphere has over 1TB of scratchspace (space which is NOT BACKED UP, to be used for temporary files only, that may disappear at any time) for users. Each user has, in additional to their home directory mounted from coxeter, a directory in /DO_NOT_BACK_UP/scratch/<user’s account name>.
sphere update at 3:45pm on Wednesday July 10, 2013
July 8, 2013 by
Starting at approximately 3:45pm on Wednesday, Jul 10 we will be updating sphere‘s hardware. The new sphere will have 2 6-core Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs and 64GB of RAM in an energy-efficient system. There will be a shared scratchspace area that users can use to temporarily store files during computations. Please note that the scratchspace area WILL NOT BE BACKED UP and any files put there could be erased or deleted without warning at any time. For example, a user with account name janedoe can use the scratchspace in:
/DO_NOT_BACK_UP/scratch/janedoe
It is expected that the hardware changeover will not be very difficult, but not quite all of the software will be ready yet. We have newer versions of most of the software from the old sphere. We will need Thursday to install the new Mathematica and currently there are negotiations underway to get a version of maple for sphere. In order to understand usage could you please let us know (at requests@math.toronto.edu) if you have used maple in the last three years and if you think having maple on the new sphere is important.
A newer, larger version of coxeter is also being planned for later this summer.
Please type bigjobs on coxeter or visit:
http://www.math.toronto.edu/help/bigjobs.txt
to read the guidelines for running large programs on our departmental systems.
We expect that sphere will be back up around 4:15pm if there are no unforeseen problems. Please let us know (at requests@math.toronto.edu) if you have any problems with or questions about the new sphere.
mailserver and coxeter restart delay
June 26, 2013 by
coxeter and the mail server are taking somewhat longer to restart due to a longer time being spent expanding the filesystem size for the mail server. Further updates will be posted when time estimates are available. We expect these machines to be back up before 7pm.
Software updates at 4:15pm on Wednesday June 26, 2013
June 25, 2013 by
The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and the mail, web, share, ptr, and blog/wiki servers will have software updates applied this Wednesday afternoon, June 26, 2013 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5:00pm.
MATLAB sessions on Tuesday June 18, 2013
June 6, 2013 by
The Licensed Software Office would like to pass along the following invitation.
Faculty, staff, researchers and students are welcome to join us at complimentary MATLAB seminars at the University of Toronto:
Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Location: 1180 Auditorium (Bahen Centre for Information Technology (BA))
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Our event features two technical sessions presented by MathWorks engineers:
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Session 1: Image Processing with MATLAB
Learn how MATLAB and the Image Processing Toolbox can provide a flexible environment to explore design ideas and how to create unique solutions for imaging systems.
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.: Session 2: Optimization in MATLAB
Learn to set up and run optimizations using MATLAB and discuss how to choose the best solver for an optimization problem.
View complete session descriptions and register at mathworks.com/seminars/UT2013.
