Information Systems maintains most of the larger cells at MIT. These cells include: athena.mit.edu, net.mit.edu, dev.mit.edu and rel-eng.athena.mit.edu. The Student Information Processing Board (SIPB), a student-governed organization, dedicated to improving computing, also runs a cell, sipb.mit.edu, from which they export all their software and documents. This cell has become the second most-accessed cell on campus, because of the popularity of the software made available by SIPB. There are also a number of other cells on campus, run by other departments and groups, most of which are not advertised outside MIT.
AFS plays a major role within MIT for distributed file storage; it provides easier large-scale sytem administration and more security than NFS. However, for groups with diverse hardware clients that do not support AFS or with limited resources, NFS, AUFS or PC file-sharing are predominantly the solutions chosen.
The largest cell, athena.mit.edu, is used for general access by students, faculty, and staff, and contains approximately 15,000 home directories, several hundred projects volumes, and several hundred other volumes for information sharing and data storage. About 20,000 users and 30,000 groups are registered in its protection database, making it one of the largest in use (and as such, we have discovered and fixed many problems). The cell is now running a variant of the AFS 3.3a server software for its database processes, and we expect to update the fileserver processes from a 3.2 base in the near future.
MIT often makes some changes to the stock Transarc AFS distribution.