ECE and CS share a general-purpose computing lab called the Wilkinson lab, and is available to ECE and CS students, students taking our courses, and our faculty and staff. The lab may be used for course work, web surfing, and pretty much anything else. However, it is not to be used for research work. (Your advisor’s infrastructure must be used for that.)

The lab has its own authentication system and shares a single homedir filesystem. That means, your files follow you on all of the lab computers.

Reservations

If you’d like to reserve the lab, please see our information page.

Wilkinson Lab

Located in Tech M338, it has 22 dual-boot computers, a workgroup printer, a mobile projector, and lounge area with seating and tables. It also has 3 large TV montors on the walls, and hardware to allow users to duplicate their laptop displays wirelessly.

Workstations

Here is a list of the dual-boot desktop machines available in the lab. N.B., while you may remotely log into the Linux machines, it is strongly discouraged, as the machines may at any time and without notice be powered off or rebooted by other students in the lab. Instead, use the lab servers, described in the next section, below.

alfred.eecs.northwestern.edu
bane.eecs.northwestern.edu
batgirl.eecs.northwestern.edu
batman.eecs.northwestern.edu
clayface.eecs.northwestern.edu
cobblepott.eecs.northwestern.edu
freeze.eecs.northwestern.edu
gordon.eecs.northwestern.edu
gotham.eecs.northwestern.edu
harley.eecs.northwestern.edu
huntress.eecs.northwestern.edu
hush.eecs.northwestern.edu
joker.eecs.northwestern.edu
killercroc.eecs.northwestern.edu
madhatter.eecs.northwestern.edu
nightwing.eecs.northwestern.edu
poisonivy.eecs.northwestern.edu
ras.eecs.northwestern.edu
riddler.eecs.northwestern.edu
robin.eecs.northwestern.edu
scarecrow.eecs.northwestern.edu
selina.eecs.northwestern.edu

Servers

So while the lab computers are dual boot, there are currently 4 server class machines running Linux. You may log into any of them to work on projects without the fear that a fellow student will reboot or shut down the machine. These are:

  • finagle.wot.eecs.northwestern.edu A light-weight, general-purpose host.

  • hanlon.wot.eecs.northwestern.edu A beefy workhorse used especially for CS213. It is equipped with the NVIDIA Tesla K20c GPU and the Intel Phi GPU parallel computing engines.

  • moore.wot.eecs.northwestern.edu The beefiest workhorse of them all. This is the newest addition to the server collection and is designed to replace murphy.

  • labfs.eecs.northwestern.edu You won’t be able to log into this one, but if you put web files in your ~/public_html directory, they will be available at http://labfs.eecs.northwestern.edu/~YOUR_NETID/...

NOTE WELL

As it warns in the message of the day on every lab computer:

HOMEDIRS ON THE LAB MACHINES ARE WIPED EACH SUMMER, ONE MONTH AFTER THE SPRING QUARTER IS OVER. PLEASE BE SURE TO BACK UP ANYTHING YOU WANT TO KEEP BEFORE THEN.