Links

Related Courses

EE398A is the first course in this two course series. EE398 (not offered this year) is a condensed version of EE398A and EE398B. You may want to look at their webpages for old lecture notes and projects.

Online Papers

Useful resources for online papers are IEEE Xplore (available from the Stanford network or through proxy), CiteSeer and Google Scholar.

Matlab

Matlab will be required for the homework assignments. You can use your own computer, or those available in the SCIEN Lab, Sweet Hall and other Stanford computing facilities.

Using Matlab on Stanford Computers Remotely

IMPORTANT: This is an unofficial guide. The official contact for SCIEN Lab issues and technical problems is the SCIEN Lab TA (Shantanu Rane).

Apart from buying a student's license or going to the SCIEN Lab or Sweet Hall, you can use Matlab remotely from your PC if you can connect to the Stanford network - and your connection is fast enough, for instance if you live on campus.

First of all, we assume that you have an application to establish a TELNET connection. We recommend SecureCRT, the standard TELNET application at Stanford, available at http://www.stanford.edu/group/itss/ess/. Recall that to access any Stanford machine you need a Leland account, that is, a Stanford Network ID (SUNetID) and a password.

An X-Window server is an application you may install on your PC that allows you to connect to a UNIX machine and see in your PC what you would see if you were working in front of the UNIX machine itself, including not only text, but also graphics. Two examples of such programs are Hummingbird Exceed and M/X. The former is not free, but much better. The latter can be used for free during a limited trial period and can be downloaded from http://www.microimages.com/freestuf/mix/.

To establish this connection, you usually need to:

Launch your X-Window server (using for instance, Exceed).
Launch your TELNET application (for instance, Samson) and establish a connection to a UNIX machine having MATLAB installed (for instance, elaine.stanford.edu, cardinal.stanford.edu, saga, firebird, forsythe, etc.). Your login and password are those corresponding to your Leland account. If you wish to connect to the ISE machines, please read below.
In your TELNET application, type
>setenv DISPLAY ${REMOTEHOST}:0.0
>xterm &
(optional test, opens a graphical terminal window, it can take minutes over a DSL connection!)
>matlab &
Wait for a few seconds for MATLAB to start.

Not all UNIX machines are properly configured and contain MATLAB properly installed. Save your files frequently in case the connection is lost, and use the Matlab command 'save' in your code to save partial data into MAT files. You can easily recover them later.

Use the UNIX commands 'xterm &' to open new windows and 'ssh' to connect to other machines, if necessary.

Connecting to the SCIEN Lab machines and tips

From the Stanford network, you can use scien0.stanford.edu,...,scien19.stanford.edu. The generic address scien.stanford.edu doesn't always work.

The SCIEN system is on an internal EE network for security reasons, which is why you cannot connect to them directly. Perhaps the best is to use Real VNC to connect to a Stanford office computer first. If you don't have an office computer at Stanford, you can connect to elaine.stanford.edu, for instance, and then to the SCIEN machines. In my experience, indirect connections from outside the Stanford network are problematic. The UNIX command ssh will come in handy.

Some machines are configured to terminate idle connections, which can interrupt a long simulation, especially when the connection is received from outside the Stanford network. One possible way to get around this problem is to keep an xterm on, separate from your simulation, and ping the machine to which you are connected regularly (thanks to Shantanu for this tip).

For technical problems, please contact the SCIEN Lab TA.