Compute Servers (For EECs Staff/PhDs Only)

The Faculty of EECS has a large number of Linux-based compute servers (or grunt-servers) available for any type of computational tasks required by today’s Research, and they are accompanied by a large variety of up-to-date Software, IDEs, frameworks, libraries and toolkits.

Servers List

The list shows the available Compute Servers owned by the School and by Research Groups.

Access

Users can access the servers based on the “Access” field in the above list.

• School: Open access to all Research members
• <Research Group Name>: Access to members of that Research Group

Users can access the servers via SSH. Access to servers owned by Research Groups may be granted by an official request to the Group’s supervisors.

Some servers my have restricted access only to members of a Research Group working on a Research Project and will be displayed on the above table.

Shares

The following Shares are available to all Compute Servers (and Managed Desktops):

Home folder

Your EECS home directory is available to all Compute Servers and the ‘login servers’. You can write data into your home directory from Server A and they will also be available on Server B.

Group Shares

Group shares are available on all Compute Servers and ‘login servers’ via NFS. Typically, they can be accessible via the /import/$GROUP_SHARE_NAME, by the members of a Research Group.

For example, to access the Group Share named ‘demo-groupshare-1‘, you can access it from any Compute Server or Linux Managed Desktop via /import/demo-group-share-1 . In this example, you will be able to access that group share, only if you are a member of the ‘demogroup‘, as seen from the Group Permissions:

harry@exeter ~ $ ls -lha /import/demo-groupshare-1/
total 1.5M
drwxrws---.   4 harry demogroup 4.0K May  1 15:39 .
drwxr-xr-x. 119 root  root       0 May 10 11:48 ..
drwxr-xr-x.   2 root  demogroup 4.0K May  1 11:37 DATASETS

For the creation of a new Group Share, please raise a HelpDesk Ticket, detailing the reason and the requirements for that Share.

Software Share

Software, IDEs, packages, libraries etc are available on the compute servers either locally (based on past Requests) or centrally in the /import/linux/ Software Share. This software share is available to all Compute Servers and Managed Desktops in EECS and it is available via NFS.

Applications installed inside that Software Share may also be available as custom binaries on all Servers and Desktops, which, when users execute them, prepares the user’s environment accordingly and launch the intended application.

Most of the libraries and toolkits available in the ‘/import/linux’ Software Share are also available via the environment modules, for ease of use.

harry@exeter ~ $ ls /import/linux
android-studio                  erlang              opencv
atk                             feko                python
batik                           tensorflow          matlab
cuda                            ...                 ...
...
...

Usage

Use nice to make your long-running jobs give way to lower-latency jobs (like text editors..). The nice value you use should be proportional to the amount of time you expect your job to run. Given in practice the longest-running job will always finish last anyway, it’s polite not to make text editors unnecessarily slow.

Useful applications are screen and tmux, which allow you to detach from a long-running terminal, leave a task running at the background and re-attach to it later. This way, if you suddenly lose your network connection to the server unexpectedly, your processes won’t quit and your Session will still be alive.