The Department of Computer Science's technical staff has contacted Dell to address the continuing delays and crashes that have inhibited students and professors from completing their projects and conducting research.
These hardware problems are the result of the department's move to a new file system — with which students can store and retrieve files and run programs — to provide more disk space and quicker hardware at a lower price.
"Dell has been very cooperative and has sent us an entire box of hardware to replace the problematic machines," said Jeff Coady, director of computing facilities. Dell, Coady and his staff conducted "component-level" repair, which involves swapping parts to diagnose the problem, he said.
Until about a month ago, all four file systems were malfunctioning, but a change in memory has greatly improved stability. Now, only one file server is defective, Coady said.
The department is still unsure what the cause of the problem is, but is hesitant to conduct further tests on the file system because these trials create machine hangs and further instability.
"Right now, nothing is scheduled," Coady said. "We have the equipment to try and change, but we are quite stable now so we have no push to do it." Unless more problems occur, the staff will postpone further trials and focus on retaining the current, relatively stable condition until the semester ends.
Students had mixed responses, though many agreed that the system is slowly improving. Sam Eilertsen '12 said he hasn't noticed any major problems recently, whereas major crashes used to prevent him from using the software, available only at the Center for Information Technology, for his animation class.
Vihang Mehta '12 said Wednesday that the system was "pretty bad yesterday," but was fixed in a few minutes.
Siddhartha Jain '11 said that circumstances are "better than last semester when they didn't change the file system" and said that the department has been "transparent" in informing the students of the trials and problems it was facing.
