What is Athena?
Athena is MIT's primary academic computing environment, providing academic software, courseware, and public computing. 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.
Where is Athena?
Athena clusters: The most visible face of Athena is that of the public cluster. Athena clusters (computing labs), are located throughout campus in academic buildings. They are open to all members of the MIT Community.
Quickstations: Athena quickstations are Athena workstations which limit session duration to 10 minutes. They are located in high-traffic areas and provide quick access to Athena to check e-mail, course web pages, print documents, or other quick activities while ensuring equitable access to these workstations.
Dorm clusters: Some dormitories have Athena clusters which are essentially smaller versions of the public clusters. The dorm clusters are open to residents of the dorm only.
Dialup Servers: Although the name is a holdover from the days of modems, the dialup servers are still heavily used for remote access to Athena. Users connect to the dialups using SSH to use Athena software from their Mac or PC or other remote location.
Private Workstations: Athena workstations are in many labs and offices throughout campus. Any member of the community can install Athena on a supported hardware configuration, including virtual machines. Debathena, the latest version of Athena, provides multiple levels of Athena compatibility, ranging from bare-bones integration to a configuration identical to that found in the public clusters.
Who uses Athena?
While the components of Athena (Kerberos, Printing, AFS, etc) are used in everyday computing tasks by all members of the MIT community, students remain the primary users of the Athena environment. As students are on a different schedule than most administrative and support staff, the highest use of the clusters occurs in the afternoon and evening hours. While recent surveys report 95% ownership of laptops among students, the vast majority of these students do not carry their laptop with them during their daily class schedule, due to concerns about weight or security. Athena remains the easiest way for students keep on top of their schedule and assignments during the school day. Additionally, hundreds of students have installed Athena on their personal computers, allowing them to use Athena from the comfort of their dorm room in the evenings.
During the semester, on a typical week, over 39,800 people will log in to an Athena workstation. If distributed evenly across the entire week, that's 3-4 logins per minute! Granted, some of those are people logging in multiple times, but during that same typical week, Athena will have approximately 6200 unique logins. (For comparison purposes, there are approximately 4200 undergradutes at MIT).
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. 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.