History of growth of the UNIX network in Physics Dept.

The first UNIX workstation of Physics Department was bought in 1989. It is a SUN Sparc1 workstation. It provided the basic email and research computation functions and has been retired now. The UNIX network of Physics Department began to grow from that time.

Two years later, two HP9000 workstations (hp & hp10) were joined as a member of the network. The computing power of the department continued to grow and the demands of the computing power became larger at the same time!

The another two years (1994), two more SUN SPARC workstations had been equipped. One of the workstations (sun1) contains 2 high-speed CPUs and became the file server of the UNIX network. Until now, there are about 60GB harddisk storages on the file server.

Start from 1995, a new stream: Computational Physics Stream has been created, and in order to satisfy the demands of a large number of research projects and new teaching courses, the department has invested over 3.5 million dollars in two years to build up two computer laboratories (PC Laboratory & UNIX Laboratory). Until now, the department has 4 computer laboratories and three DEC AlphaServers, 60 DEC Alpha high-speed workstations, ten SUN UltraSparc, HP and SGI workstations.