Advancing Knowledge through Technology

CHASS Facilities

CHASS provides full computing accounts - including user disk storage, central backups, access to all software, databases, textbases, dictionaries, Internet, electronic mail - to all current faculty, staff, and graduate students from the social sciences and humanities departments within the Faculty of Arts and Science, and to those institutes, centres, departments, and other units from outside of Arts and Science, that have agreements with our Facility. Undergraduate course accounts are also provided whenever requested by member departments, though personal undergraduate accounts are not. The latter may be obtained from the Information Commons, Robarts Library.

Apart from our own Computer Labs and the Multimedia Centre, CHASS operates a line of Silicon Graphics and SUN/Solaris UNIX servers and various UNIX workstations (SGI, SUN, Linux, BSD, etc.). Approximately 5,000 user accounts are distributed among our 6 servers. System peripherals include over 300 Gbytes of disk storage, 7 tape units, and numerous communications devices.

Software available on CHASS servers includes major UNIX editors (pico, emacs, vi, xedit); elm and pine electronic mail packages; numerous statistical, econometric, and mathematical packages and libraries (SAS, SPSS, TSP, Shazam, Matlab, IMSL, GQOPT); relational database systems; humanities textbases, social sciences and financial databases; dictionaries (incl. the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary); text analysis tools (PAT, TACT); and many others.

Please be advised: in order to access the CHASS Data Centre from an off campus computer, you must have authenticate through The My Access Service, and use the following URL:

http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=http://datacentre.chass.utoronto.ca

CHASS provides and assists in the development of departmental Web sites, web-based resource repositories for research projects and courses, and home pages for individual users.

Other CHASS services include assistance in the development of instructional computing materials; tutorials and short courses in the use of electronic mail, Internet, and other computing applications.

CHASS operates three server rooms with arrays of UNIX and NT servers, and two computing labs: a graduate lab - on the 14th floor of Robarts Library; and the Multimedia Centre for Learning in the Humanities (split between Carr Hall, St. Michael's College, and University College).