GRACE for Students

This page is intended to give an overview of GRACE for students of courses, as well as some answers about how things are typically done. Note that not everything described will be applicable for all courses; GRACE offers a framework of tools and services, but individual instructors will choose which tools to make use of for their specific course.

First off, many (most?) classes do not use GRACE at all. If you are taking a course which does not use GRACE, but you think your experience would benefit from what GRACE offers, do NOT try to register the course for GRACE yourself, or request a project space. Such requests will not go through. Instead, talk to your professor and convince him/her to request GRACE space for the course.

Students should NOT attempt to register for GRACE project spaces. We do NOT dispense GRACE Project spaces for classwork; if you feel the need of extra space for classwork, talk to your professor and have him/her request class space. If you need GRACE Project space for a project that is not part of standard classwork, have your faculty advisor request a Project SPACE for you. We do NOT dispense GRACE Project spaces directly to students.

Secondly, your access to course materials on GRACE and your ability to login to the GRACE unix systems are contingent upon your being registered for a course using GRACE for the current semester. GRACE course spaces follow a schedule controlling access. You can continue to access the GRACE unix shell access systems until the "Logins Disabled" date for the last GRACE enabled course you were registered for. You can continues to access your files until the "File Access Removed" date; between the "Logins Disabled" and the "File Access Removed" date you can access the files from the generic Terpconnect login systems (e.g. ssh to terpconnect.umd.edu) or via the file access methods.

GRACE courses follow a standard directory layout.. Each student gets a personal workspace, under COURSEROOT/student-COURSE-SECTION-NUMBER/LOGINNAME where LOGINNAME is your campus login name (i.e., the part to the left of the @ in your @umd.edu or @terpconnect.umd.edu email address). The same directory occurs under COURSEROOT/student, so you can use either path. NOTE: these are the SAME directory, despite the different path names. They are not COPIES. Any modifications occurs in both places at the same time. So do NOT delete files in one place because you think it is a duplicate of what is in the other; there is just one file and if you delete it, it vanishes from both places.

Some courses (especially in CMSC) want you to use GRACE for submission of work. You have a directory COURSEROOT/submit-COURSE-SECTION-NUMBER/LOGINNAME (or equivalently COURSEROOT/submit/LOGINNAME, which again is the SAME directory with different path) where you can submit work. You can only put files in that directory; you cannot modify or read them afterwards. Generally, you should not be accessing that directory directly, but instead use the submit script. Again, this option is only used by some courses; do NOT use the submit script unless your instructors have told you to.