Computing services

There's a range of services for computer users in Informatics. It's a long list, but it's in bite-sized chunks:

Logging in

• The Desktop Finder app helps you find a student lab with free desktop computers.
• Login from anywhere with ssh or with a graphical DICE login, and see General purpose computing servers.
• The Remote Desktop service gives a graphical DICE login from the wider internet.
• Remote working.
• Login logs - check your recent logins: does anyone else have access to your account?
• Remote wake-up of DICE desktop computers.
• Wireless network.

Email, web and printing

• Email services.
• Web services.
• Printing (and scanning and copying).
• Office 365 productivity tools.

Your files and data

• AFS and filesystems - we use AFS for home directories and shared group space.
• Backups and mirrors - regular backup copies of your data. See also Backups for self-managed machines.
• Subversion and Git and gerrit code repositories.
• PostgreSQL databases for teaching and research.

Audio-visual equipment, recordings, and events

• Event and AV facilities - such as microphones, networking, screens and projection, cameras.
• Media Hopper Replay is the University's lecture recording service.
  
• IS conference help and facilities - IS provides IT facilities for conferences and events organised via Edinburgh First.

Research support

• Corpora for research.
• ECDF (Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility) is a high-performance cluster of servers (1968 processors) and storage (around 239TB of data capacity) which is available to researchers from, and associated with, the University of Edinburgh.
• GPU and cluster computing - large scale computing.
• Informatics Software Download Database (ISDD) - a repository for software downloads.
• PostgreSQL databases for teaching and research.
• Qualtrics - a survey platform
• Server rooms for self-managed servers - a home for rack-mounted servers.
• Virtualisation - virtual machines and hosting services.

Teaching support

• The Desktop Finder app helps you find a student lab with free desktops.
• Learning Technology support - we help staff with online assessment, online learning, and more.
• Media Hopper Replay is the University's lecture recording service.
• GPU and cluster computing - large scale computing.
• PostgreSQL databases for teaching and research.
• Theon - the School's primary information management system.

Admin - where to go

• Purchasing - how to buy IT equipment: rules and procedures we must follow.
• Theon - the School's primary information management system.
• Webmark is an online forms tool.

The services on this page are provided either by the School's own computing team or by IS, the University's computing division. The Computing accounts page lists the various accounts you may need to use when accessing these services.