The X-Ray and Observational Astronomy Group maintains its own local area network consisting of a large number of computers running linux for research-oriented and general purpose computing by both under- and post-graduate students, staff and visitors. The majority of users are equipped with powerful workstations on their desks with adequate local disk space and DVD rewriting capability. For the storage of astronomical datasets, a large RAID storage server is available and we run our own Windows and email services.

We use Scientific Linux 4 (https://www.scientificlinux.org), which is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) backed by CERN and Fermilab. Members of the department have access to the department's high performance Sun 256 opteron CPU cluster for parallel job requirements.

There is an extensive collection of software packages including IDL, the Starlink Software Collection, IRAF, XMM SAS, Headas, CIAO, ftools, Fortran and C compilers and libraries. A general use lab is available, not only housing the latest workstations but group printers, backup devices and scanners.

If you have an XROA computer account please log in here to use Groupware: https://mail.star.le.ac.uk

Groupware consists of webmail facilities as well as a Knowledge Base which should be your first port of call for any computing queries.

Short-term visitors to Leicester can pick up a handbook and obtain a guest account upon their arrival.