Engineering students were prevented from accessing MathCAD, a commonly used calculation program produced by the Mathsoft Company, in Thornton Library after the server temporarily crashed Sunday.
The program is designed to increase engineers' productivity by allowing access to a framework that creates and shares engineering calculations, according to the Mathsoft Web site. More than 2.5 million users across the world rely on MathCAD.
Tim Tolson, ITC manager of research computing support, said the server crashed as a result of a "denial of service attack."
"It occurs when computer hackers flood Internet ports with bogus requests for reply of service until the server shuts down from being overloaded," Tolson said.
The server crash may have set back Engineering students working on their theses, which are due today, but other students may also have been affected.
"A crash of the program would slow calculations down dramatically for a thesis because you would have to do all of the work by hand," third-year Engineering student Derek Guthrie said. "MathCAD greatly simplifies math problems, so it does the grunt work for you."
Fourth-year Engineering student Gary Sharp used MathCAD to complete his thesis.
"I used it to graph the results visually," Sharp said. "Having MathCAD shut down before completing your thesis is pretty harsh. It would make it really hard to complete your thesis on time."
MathCAD is a calculation program commonly used for theses, but also for other tasks, Assistant Dean for Engineering Paxton Marshall said.
"I would encourage individual students set back in their work by the crash to talk with instructors about it," Marshall said. "It is the instructor's decision to grant extensions."
When the server overloaded it prevented additional information from being able to enter the server.
According to Tolson, every computer in the library is connected to a central server in order to access the license necessary to operate the MathCAD program. Since all of the computers are allowed to access MathCAD from a central license, individual licenses do not have to be purchased for each computer, which would be much more expensive.
Tolson further explained that the server controls the number of programs that can operate at any given time. Because the library computers are all connected to the central server, which controls access to the MathCAD program, the attack prevented access to the program.
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