Eos, Engineering Computing at North Carolina State University

About Eos Engineering Computing

The College of Engineering at NC State University offers its students one of the best academic computing environments in the world. Called Eos , this environment is taught to students in their first year in the class, E115: Introduction to Computing Environments.

Eos is a distributed client-server network running AFS, a location-independent file system that delivers an unparalleled suite of engineering software to three platforms: Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux. Eos unifies hundreds of workstations in labs across the college, as well as student-owned computers that connect to Eos through remote-access services and the Virtual Computing Lab.

The primary mission of the Office of Information Technology and Engineering Computer Services (ITECS) is to build and support Eos. Guided by the COE Computer Committee, ITECS acquires and installs the software and hardware that faculty need for teaching. ITECS works with department IT to meet the discipline-specific requirements of individual departments, and with university IT, such as DELTA and OIT, to develop technologies that benefit both college and university computing.

In 1990, engineering students selected Eos, Greek goddess of the dawn, as the name for the college computing environment. Eos was originally built with technologies developed in the Athena Project at MIT and Project Andrew at Carnegie Mellon University. Formerly an engineering-only system, Eos was expanded to the rest of campus during the mid-90s in a project called Unity. Today, all NCSU students, faculty and staff receive Unity accounts on a fully merged Eos/Unity realm.