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Athena is MIT's primary academic computing environment, providing academic software, courseware, and public computing and printing facilities to the MIT Community. The primary purpose of Athena is to facilitate teaching and learning, whether part of the curriculum or independent endeavors. Athena provides a consistent desktop environment throughout campus, allowing users to work on academic assignments at any Athena workstation. Tight integration between the operating system and the Athena environment allows for low-cost deployment of software and the creation of a course work environment with minimal effort on the part of instructors. Additionally, many student printing facilities are currently located in the clusters.

Athena consists of multiple software components and services provided by IS&T. For detailed information on these components and services, including information on how they are utilized across the community, please see the "Components of Athena" page.

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Of those 39,800 people mentioned above, over 10,700 of them logged in from the clusters. The rest used Athena Quickstations, the Athena Dialup (remote access) servers, and over 10,400 used Athena Workstations located in their office, lab, department, or dorm room.

How much does Athena cost to develop and support?

There are no full-time staff devoted solely to Athena Development. Development is driven largely by the Student Information Processing Board, a student group whose members work on Athena on a volunteer basis.

How much does Athena cost to support?

User support for Athena is provided by 80% of one full-time staff member's time, in addition to student support. By contrast, approximately 40 full time staff members are required to support general-purpose Mac, PC and Mobile Device computing at MIT.