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Shared Computing Environment

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Overview

FarmShare, Stanford’s shared computing environment, provides Linux facilities for general and research computing to anyone with a full-service SUNet ID. There are three environments available, each with a separate purpose.  All machines currently run the Ubuntu operating system.

The cardinal machines are intended for low-intensity processes, such as email, chat and newsgroup clients.

The barley machines are available for non-interactive scheduled jobs, including those with higher memory requirements, and cannot be directly accessed.  These are the best choice for long-running, memory-intensive jobs that require no interaction.

The corn machines are suitable for interactive general computing, including most coursework, general programming, and other common computing tasks.  Corn is also appropriate for long-running and/or compute- or memory-intensive tasks (e.g., mathematical and statistical analysis, physical simulation, parallel programming).  Generally, processes taking more than a day should be run on the barley machines where possible.

Available to

Current faculty, staff, and students.

Features

  • Supports a number of different types of computing tasks
  • Maintains locally installed software on each machine.
  • Provides a selection of software, including a number of popular licensed applications.
  • Supports long-running, multi-day jobs.
  • Supports parallel processing (via MPI or OpenMP).
  • Queuing system (Grid Engine) is available on the barley cluster.

Requirements

  • A full-service SUNet ID.
  • A computer with a program that provides SSH capability.

Data security restrictions

May be used to transmit, but not store, Prohibited, Restricted, and Confidential Data, as defined by the Stanford University Information Security Office.

See Secure AFS for secure storage, but please note that FarmShare systems do not support processing or manipulating data in Secure AFS storage.

Support

To report a hardware failure or other system problem, please submit a HelpSU request.

Additional help may be available from community resources, including the FarmShare wiki and mailing list, the su.computers.unix and su.computers.linux newsgroups, and related newsgroups and mailing lists.

Rates

Free of charge.

Getting started

Users are required to connect remotely. See Logging in to shared UNIX workstations for instructions.

Last modified Mon, 12 Mar, 2012 at 17:41