Always remember that this cluster is a shared resource. With that in mind, here are some user guidelines to help keep your processes and your peer's processes all running smoothly.
When in doubt of what and how many system resources you may be using at one time, use the command:
ps -AFw --forest | grep <username>where <username> is your login name. This will give you a hierarchical list of what processes you are running and how much RAM each one is using. In the resulting output, the total image size in Kb is the 5th column, and the 6th column is the amount of physical memory in use, in Kb.
The best way to connect to the cluster is to use an SSH client. I recommend using PuTTY, it's a small, stable and free SSH client with X-Window forwarding capabilities.
If you are not actively using a connected session on Boston, please close it. Idle connections waste resources and can block connections from other users.
If you have long-standing connections from Boston to another machine, please consider closing that connection and connecting directly to the other machine via your local SSH client - this way, you are not needlessly using resources on Boston.
Please limit your use of remote graphical tools on the cluster to only those times when you need it. If you use the VNC Server system, it will launch (for each instance) a full set of the graphical shell programs such as the KDE initialization pieces, the GNOME graphical environment pieces, and other various utilities that automatically get started. Please consider the fact that if you are using VNC to launch a session, that a plethora of other processes are launched to support it - and thus, take up more system resources and CPU time.
If you must use a graphical interface with the system, please consider using X-Win32 (for Windows only). X-Win32 is available to all SCS users (computers on the SCS network) and can be installed from the directory : \\Monolith\pc_dist\X-Win32\ Read the instructions in the file x-win32install_doc.doc to install it.
If you have the X-Win32 client running on your computer, you will be able to launch xterm, firefox, and other X-Windows applications directly from a PuTTY session. To ensure this, within the PuTTY configuration (under "Connection" / "SSH" / "X11") you should check the checkbox for "Enable X11 Forwarding" and set the X display location to "localhost:0". If you need help configuring this, you can view some documentataion here, or ask me.
You can view the licensing information for X-Win32 at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~help/software_licensing/software_licenses/Starnet.html
You have the same ability to read and write cross-mounted disks that you would have if you were logged in to the machine where those disks reside. Cross-mounting provides more efficient usage of disk space, because it is not necessary to keep large data files (e.g., TREC data) or indexes on each machine you use. One file can be used on any of our machines. It also means that you can "load balance" by shifting your activity to machines that are not being used as heavily.
Cross-mounted disks are accessed over the network, which has two important consequences: