Cluster History

At one time the lab was funded by the CS department, but this is no longer the case. The UGCS lab was used for classes up to and including the 2002-2003 school year. After classes stoped being held in UGCS, it continued as a student run Unix cluster open to the caltech comunity.

Hardware used at UGCS

Current and past sysadmins of the UGCS/CS10 lab

Name                  House/yr* Username    Start   - end
------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott Hemphill          gr?     [hemphill]     ??   -    91
Rick Koshi              Da 91   [rhkoshi]   06/88   - 09/89
Dave Gillespie          Da 86   [daveg]     06/88   - 09/89
Walker Aumann           Bl 92   [walkera]   06/89   - 09/89
Bo Adler                Da 93   [thumper]   10/89   - 06/93
Dean Brettle            Da 92   [dean]      10/89   - 12/91
Maneesh Sahani          Da 91   [maneesh]   10/89   - 03/92
Yair Zadik              Da 92   [yair]      01/91   - 10/91
Alf Mikula              Da 93   [mikula]    06/91   - 10/91
Waqar Malik             gr      [waqar]     06/91   - 08/92
Jamie Sherman           Da 94   [jamie]     07/91   - 06/92
Jon Lange               Da 93   [jlange]    10/91   - 07/93
Laurent Stadler         Da 95   [lstadler]  11/91   - 11/92
Karen Bruner            Da 94   [napalm]    01/93   - 10/94
Dan Egnor               Da 96   [egnor]     04/93   - 06/96
Seth LaForge            Da 97   [sethml]    10/93   - 06/97
Blake Jones             Ll 98   [foo]       10/95   - 06/98
Wesley Tanaka           Da 99   [wtanaka]   06/96   - 09/96
Aaron Denney            Ru 00   [wnoise]    06/97   - 09/00
Harry Liu               Bl 01   [rliu]      05/98   - 06/01
Shannon Stewman         Ri 01   [stew]      05/98   - 06/01
Dylan Simon             NA 03   [dylan]     09/00   - 06/03
David Stafford          Da 04   [dstaff]    05/01   - 06/04
Evan Murphy             Ru 07   [erm]       01/03   - 03/07
Joshua Goldstein        Da 07   [goldstei]  01/03   - 01/07
Kenneth Heafield        Da 07   [kpu]       01/04   - 03/07
Elizabeth Fong       Da/Bl 09   [elizabeth] 01/06   - 01/08
Alex Roper           Da/Bl 09   [alexr]     01/07   - present
Matthew Maurer       Da/Bl 10   [maurer]    01/07   - present
Joshua Hutchins         Ru 10   [jdhutchin] 01/07   - present

------------------------------------------------------------------
House/yr* = primary UG house affiliation, and year UG degree finished
  (or went on leave). NA = not affiliated

Stories

Joshua adds, "After a discussion with Bo Adler over Alumni weekend, it was revealed that the lab ran a custom-written Unix and some GNU software in the early 1990s. The lab started with a bunch of HP machines used for insument readings and grew from there."

From Jon Lange:

 UGCS came into existence in the spring of 1989, I believe (when it was
 known as the CS10 lab).  Before that, it was the "Chipmunk" lab (the
 machines that are possibly still used by the CNS184 students).  Those
 machines ran some proprietary HP Pascal system.

 The original crew, as I recall, was Dave Gillespie, Scott Hemphill, Rick
 Koshi (he took his wife's name, and is now Rick Heaton), and Walker
 Aumann.  Scott Hemphill may have never been an official sysadmin, but he
 had root for quite a long time (until 1991 at least).

 [ snip - list included in above ]

 I can't think of anybody else who was ever a sysadmin, but then I was
 never really involved in lab politics until early 1991.  You could also
 send email to any of the former sysadmins to find out what they remember
 (I doubt you'd hear back from Dave Gillespie or Rick Koshi) -- most of
 them would probably be glad to answer you.  And I see that Scott Hemphill
 still has an account (which he's used rather recently), and I'll be he's
 full of lab lore.  Of course, if you talk to anybody who was around
 before the summer of 1991, you'll have to call it the CS10 lab if you
 want expect them to have any clue what you're talking about.

 One of these days when I turn on my SPARC again, I can dig through old
 email and see if I can get a clue about who was a sysadmin at what time.