The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at the University of Delaware maintain a joint computing facility, known as the ECE/CIS Research Computing Laboratory. The Lab is primarily intended to support the research activities of the two departments. In general, the use of the computers is limited to the faculty and graduate students in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer & Information Sciences. Exceptions are made for undergraduates who are actively involved in a research project under the direction of a faculty member or a graduate student.

A short history lesson:

Initially, our hosts were called Vax1, Vax2, and Vax3, but this became confusing because the University’s Computing and Networking Services (CNS) had hosts with the same names. EECIS1, EECIS2, and EECIS3 were tried, but these names just never stuck. To eliminate this somewhat confusing assortment of names, Huey, Dewey, and Louie were designated as the official names of these hosts. Louie also served as the main mail gateway into our site, and therefore had been nicknamed UDel as well. Don’t let this confuse you — typically a machine has several nicknames, or aliases. For the science-fiction oriented: our machines were named after the three drones in the movie Silent Running. It turns out that they were in turn named after Donald Duck’s three mischievous nephews, and in case it isn’t obvious by now, we have chosen to carry on the Disney tradition.

Originally Huey, Dewey and Louie were Vax 11/780’s and ran version 4.3 of the Berkeley Unix (4.3BSD) operating system. Today these names still exist as servers, running Solaris, serving specific services:

• Huey – WWW
• Dewey – Runs a couple of public virtual machines (mudskipper and yankees)
• Louie – Mail

Today, in addition to the ECE/CIS research lab, undergraduate/academic labs are also run. These labs are known as ECL and ACAD.ECE.