| 3.7 OFFICE OF
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) provides state-of-the-art
computer, network,
telecommunication, and consulting services to the University of
Alabama community.
Faculty, staff, and students can turn to the OIT for access to and
assistance with e-
mail, websites, voice mail, and much more.
Student E-mail Accounts
(Crimson) All UA students have Crimson e-mail accounts
automatically created for them. Crimson is a Google Apps for
Education domain (crimson.ua.edu). Crimson e-mail accounts have the
familiar GMAIL interface and 7 GB of storage. These accounts are
used as students' official University e-mail addresses. Students
also automatically receive accounts on the central academic server,
bama.ua.edu. These accounts are primarily used to upload academic
websites or for direct login to a Sun Solaris system with
programming languages and other tools. For more information, visit
http://oit.ua.edu/oit/services/crimson-mail/.
Telephone Service Many students living on campus receive
their telephone service from Telecommunications, a department of OIT.
Basic service includes unlimited local calls, a long distance
calling card, voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, three-way
calling, and local last number redial. For more information, see the
Telecommunications’ website.
Campus Internet Access ResNet, a high-speed Internet
connection on campus is available in all residence halls and some
small-group housing units. High-speed Internet access for non-ResNet
halls is provided by Comcast. Students living off of campus may be
able to subscribe to either cable or DSL high-speed Internet
service. Additional information, including access instructions, are
located in the ITSD website.
Computer Labs Students who do not own their own computers
should be able to complete their coursework in the many computer
labs on campus. Some departments have special labs with the software
needed by their students, and there are also many general-purpose
labs that are open to any University student. For details, visit the
OIT website.
Resources for Research Those students who need computing
resources for their research are also served by OIT. As noted
previously, bama.ua.edu accounts are given to all students and can
provide a Unix platform for programming, statistical computing, or
Web development. The University of Alabama is also a member of the
Alabama Research and Education Network (AREN), which provides
high-speed network access to the SGI Altix supercomputer and the
Dense Memory Cluster and other network facilities. For more
information about AREN local access and support, visit the Alabama
Supercomputer Authority's website. The University is also a charter
member of the Internet2 project, which connects schools and
universities with a dedicated high-speed network for research.
In addition, University faculty, staff, and students may get
accounts on the High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, which can
maintain computation speeds of 1.34 teraflops (a trillion floating
point operations per second and has a storage capacity of over three
terabytes). Account application forms and terms of use are online at
the UAHPC site.
|