About The Various Machines In Our Department

We have many different kinds of machines, each with specialized purposes. In general, there are always more than one of any class of machine. If one machine is down, use another and send mail to root@cs.virginia.edu.

The department recognizes several classes of machines. Each class with a dedicated purpose. The classes are:

• Compute Servers
• Interactive Servers
• System Servers (file, mail, web, etc.)
• Special Purpose Hardware
• Public terminals

The department operates many 'compute servers.' These machines are tailored to run very large, compute-intensive jobs well. They have the most virtual memory, the fastest CPUs, and the additional benefit of having few interactive jobs competing for compute cycles.

• Interactive sessions on compute servers should be kept to a minimum.

  Keeping your mail client open for several days at a time on one of these compute servers is an inappropriate activity. We have provided interactive servers and workstations for that kind of "everyday" computing. On the other hand, it is appropriate to do big compiles on these machines, and minor editing activity between compilations is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

• No person should have more than two jobs running at the same time on any given compute server or more than four jobs total on all compute servers.

  The rationale for this guideline is that when too many jobs get into the job mix, they compete for system resources, which can significantly reduce the throughput rate for everyone. Please use the two utilities top and ps to monitor your usage. Top will provide you with information about your top CPU processes, ps will report process status. Please see their man pages for more descriptive instructions.

• Rules were meant to be broken

  We should not allow the existence of these guidelines to inhibit their entrepreneurial violation in responsible ways. For example, if you come in to work at 4:00am and see that power1 is unused and you start up 4 big jobs, that's fine. Remember not to go away and leave them running throughout the day.

CPU type	CPUs	RAM	Swap	OS	Machines
Sun Fire280R Server	2@750Mhz	4 Gb	6 Gb	Solaris 9	whirlwind archive
Sun Enterprise E3500	4@400Mhz	2 Gb	4 Gb	Solaris 9	edvac
UltraSPARC, E250 450 MHz	1	1 Gb	2 Gb	Solaris 9	stretch colossus
Intel Pentium III, 1 GHz	2	1 Gb	2 Gb	Fedora Core 3	power1 power2 power3 power4 power5 power6 power7

Use of these compute servers is limited either because a particular research group has priority on them, or because they are experimental machines.

CPU type	CPUs	RAM	Swap	OS	Machines	Comment
Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz	2	1 Gb	2 Gb	Redhat Linux 9	Sunfire1-22	Marty Humphrey's nodes
AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 240	2	2 Gb	2 Gb	1-3: Fedora Core 3 4-10: Win 2k3 11: Win XP 12: Win 2k3	Opteron 1-12	Marty Humphrey's nodes
AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 242	2	3 Gb	2 Gb	Fedora Core 3	Centurion001-064	Andrew Grimshaw's nodes
UltraSparc 500MHz	1	256 Mb	3 Gb	Solaris 9	olympus tharsis arsia apollinaris tempe tyrrhena ulysses uranius elysium	Kevin Skadron's nodes
I386 Pentium II	2	256 Mb	.5 Gb	Fedora Core 3	lava001-030	Kevin Skadron's nodes

Our interactive servers are adder, mamba, cobra, and viper. They are Sunfire v210s with dual Ultrasparc IIIi, 1.0 GHz processors and 2GB of memory IIRC.

These are not to be used for long-running jobs or jobs with very large memory needs. Typically the machine in your office will be assigned to either mamba or cobra. When logging in from outside, using the same machine you use in your office will help to more evenly disperse the computing load. If you don't have an office, just pick one and use it consistently. If the interactive server you normally use is down, you are free to use one of the others.

Servers are ONLY used for specific service tasks. We have mail servers, file servers, print servers, and web servers, to name a few. We prevent you from logging in on these servers.

The logic behind prohibiting users from using these machines is that, you wouldn't benefit from running on any of these servers. In fact, as far as CPU performance is concerned, they're much slower than the compute servers and they typically have less memory. If you were to steal cycles from file servers, you would degrade performance all over the department without improving performance for yourself.

Legion's Centurion cluster is available to people running Legion. Contact legion-sysadmin@cs.virginia.edu to request access.

The Olsson Hall Lounge and Mailroom each house 1 Windows XP workstations with a superset of our software. They have DVD burners and other software that isn't otherwise widely deployed, such as a full copy of Acrobat. These are AMD 1800+ systems named Public1 and Public2.