Access Problem Solving (digprob)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
A description of the university and its computing environment
for use in license agreementsOrganization | Interdisciplinary Labs and Centers | Offsite Laboratories | Offsite Programs | The Libraries | MITnet | The Athena Computing Environment | Authorization/Authentication/Access
MIT is an independent, co-educational, privately endowed university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 153.8 acres that extend more than a mile along the Charles River.
It is organized into five schools (Architecture and Planning; Engineering; Humanities and Social Science; Management; Science; and the Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology).
MIT has a faculty of almost 1,500 individuals (excluding visiting appointments), and employs a staff of about 7,850. Undergraduates number just over 4,400 students; graduate students just over 5,500.
Organization
The organization of the Institute includes the President, the Institute's chief executive officer, and the senior administrative officers of Provost, Associate Provosts, and academic deans, who head the Institute's five schools. The Institute's board of trustees is known as the Corporation and includes approximately seventy-five leaders in education, science, engineering, and other professions, as well as ex officio members.
Interdisciplinary Laboratories and Centers
MIT has over sixty interdisciplinary laboratories and centers. These cover a wide range of disciplines, from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture through the Nuclear Reactor Laboratory and the Women's Studies Program. These labs and centers are either administratively part of MIT or in some cases affiliated with MIT and physically located at the main MIT campus.
Offsite Laboratories
Offsite facilities include the Haystack Observatory and the Lincoln Laboratory.
The Haystack Observatory is an interdisciplinary research center engaged in radio astronomy, geodesy, atmospheric sciences, and radar applications. Haystack Observatory is located in the adjoining towns of Westford, Tyngsborough, and Groton, Massachusetts, about 35 miles northwest of the MIT campus. MIT users of digital resources at Haystack number approximately 95. Roughly fifty of these work at Lincoln Laboratory as well.
The Lincoln Laboratory is a federally sponsored center for research and development in advanced electronics, with special emphasis on applications to national defense, worldwide communication and civil air traffic control. Lincoln Laboratory is located in Lexington, Massachusetts, approximately fifteen miles from the main campus. Approximately 1,000 individuals work at Lincoln Labs, accessing the MITnet via a proxy server.
Offsite Programs
MIT offers two degree programs at locations off the Cambridge campus: a joint program offered at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the distance education option available to students enrolled in the System Design and Management (SDM) program.
WHOI is a private, nonprofit, independent marine science research facility located in the village of Woods Hole, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. MIT and WHOI entered into an agreement in 1968 to conduct a cooperative academic program leading to graduate degrees in oceanography and in oceanographic engineering. Joint degrees are single documents awarded by both institutions. Approximately 100 students can access the four MIT-owned and operated workstations located at WHOI, for use exclusively by MIT students and faculty.
The SDM program provides post-graduate, advanced engineering training in product and system development, and the principles, methods, and tools of system design and management. The SDM Program offers two MIT-degree program options: a full-time, in-residence program, and a part-time, distance-learning program, in which most classes are delivered to students' company sites.
The Libraries
The MIT libraries are highly decentralized and distributed throughout the campus. There are ten major public service points, including the following divisional libraries and branches: the Aeronautics and Astronautics Library; Barker Engineering Library; Dewey Library (Management and Social Sciences); Humanities Library; Lindgren Library (Earth and Planetary Science); Lewis Library (Music); Rotch (Architecture and Planning); Hayden Science Library; Schering-Plough Library (Neurosciences and Biomedical Imaging), and the Institute Archives.
MITnet
MIT's campus computer network is known as MITnet. It was created in 1984 and connects over 7,500 computers across the campus. These include Macintosh and DOS computers, UNIX workstations, departmental VAXes, and IBM mainframes. MITnet offers access in offices, libraries, laboratories, student residences, and many classrooms.
MITnet consists of about 180 local-area networks (LANs) connected through routers to a fiber-optic backbone. Generally, these LANs are centrally managed Ethernets shared among academic, administrative, and research users; some are departmentally managed networks. MITnet is connected to GTE, ESNet, and MediaOne.
The Athena Computing Environment
Some of the UNIX workstations on the MITnet belong to Athena, a campus-wide networked computer system serving the needs of MIT's academic community. The Athena system takes its name from Project Athena, a program to explore innovative computing at MIT which ran from 1983 through June of 1991, when Athena was adopted as MIT's academic computing infrastructure. The Athena system provides computing resources to over 18,000 users across the MIT campus through a system of 1,300 Unix workstations in more than 40 clusters, private offices, and machine rooms, all connected to MITnet. The vast majority of MIT students have Athena accounts.
Athena follows a distributed client/server model for delivering many of its computer services. The central components of Athena are workstations attached to MITnet, most of which are currently Sun SPARC workstations or SGI "Indy" workstations. Most of these workstations contain a floppy disk drive, a CD-ROM drive, and sometimes a zip drive. PostScript printers are provided throughout the network.
The software on Athena consists of four key elements: a UNIX operating system; the X Window System, developed at MIT; the AFS distributed file system; and Kerberos, MIT's authentication system. Athena provides Netscape, Mosaic, and Lynx World Wide Web browsers, as well as FTP and Telnet software.
Authorization/Authentication/Access
Our current preferred mode of access is to the World Wide Web through vendor-managed IP filtering. Authentication through personal or browser-based passwords is not administratively or practically feasible at MIT, given the scale of the Institute and its decentralized organization. When IP filtering is not supplied by the vendor, we create CGI scripts to make it unnecessary for our users to learn and manage usernames and passwords.
MIT has been assigned the entire range of IP addresses beginning with 18. In addition, two class B and ten class C ranges are required to describe the entire MIT community. MIT's domain name is generally mit.edu, but not every address at MIT resolves to this domain.
MITnet contains no firewalls or barriers to access but is tightly secured through the Kerberos authentication system. Building on this, we expect that in the future MIT will shift to a certificates-based system for limiting access to licensed materials, rather than continuing to use IP filtering. We are currently using digital certificates to control off-campus access through a proxy server, using EZProxy software.
It is not possible for the MIT Libraries to purchase products on the basis of the number of workstations on campus, since this number is not readily obtainable and fluctuates daily. In addition, we do not currently load databases locally, and prefer to avoid proprietary vendor-supplied client software in favor of web access. In most cases, we require that each title we purchase be uniquely addressable with a separate URL.
Sources
http://web.mit.edu/facts/
http://www.haystack.edu/
http://www.whoi.edu/
phone directory organizational chart
Athena On-Line Help (Information Systems)
Athena User Accounts office