CS250 Class Setup and Compute Resources

Piazza

We will be using Piazza as a newsgroup to help facilitate discussion and share information.
Nearly all course information will be distributed through Piazza, and you are encouraged to use this system for all course discussion and issues.
You will receive an invitation to join the class Piazza group within the first few days of the semester. (You can also sign up on your own.)
If you do not receive this information, please email me (bkeller at eecs).

Instructional machine access

Every student needs a CS250 class account to get access to the machines you'll be using for your labs and project.
Class account forms will be handed out in Lecture 2 on 9/3. If you didn't get one, please email me (bkeller at eecs).
Once you have an account form, follow these steps to set up your account:

Github

Github provides git repository hosting services, and they offer their services free of charge to educational institutions.
Please go to github.com and sign up for an account, if you don't have one already.

NoMachine

You will need to be able to run GUI apps remotely on the class machines.
While X-forwarding with ssh does work, NX is the preferred (read: most responsive) way to do this.

You should now be logged into the instructional server. To open up a terminal window once you've connected:

To log out, simply close the NoMachine window. You will see a prompt to either suspend or terminate your session.
Please make a habit of terminating your NX sessions when you are done working to conserve memory on the servers.

If you are having issues with NoMachine, you can try other (older) NoMachine clients that may work better on your personal machine:

Course Instructional Servers

These machines will perform decently with the VLSI tools as long as they are not overloaded.
Try to load-balance; if you notice that many of your classmates are using one machine, switch to a different one.