About Interactive computing¶
By contrast with the compute clusters, to which batch jobs must be submitted, the machines listed here are ‘interactive’ machines, meaning that users are expected to use them directly rather than through a scheduler. The main advantage is that there is no need to wait for a job to start, but at the same time, if many users are busy on the same machine, the performances quickly degrade, because of resource contention.
Often, the intractive servers have a preferred usage, such as statistical computing, and offer specific, possibly licence-restricted, software, depending on the entity that funded them.
Those machines are typically used either through SSH, through a dedicated web interface (e.g. RStudio).
List of servers and services¶
| Server | Funding | Software | Size | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brufence | LSM | Matlab, Magma | 32CPUs/128GBRAM | ssh brufence.cism.ucl.ac.be |
| SMCS | SMCS | Stata | 2x 32CPUs/384GBRAM | ssh smcs.cism.ucl.ac.be |
| Service | Backend | Software | Size | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jupyterhub | Openstack | Jupyter | 6x 4CPUs/16GBRAM | https://jupyterhub.cism.ucl.ac.be |
| Rstudio-server | SMCS1&2 | Rstudio | 2x 32CPUs/384GBRAM | https://smcs.cism.ucl.ac.be/rstudio |
Access & conditions¶
- access to most servers is granted automatically to every member of the University, a CISM account must be requested ;
- access servers for statistical computing is subjected to SMCS approval and must be requested by ticking the Statistical commputing box when requesting the CISM account ;
- access to the servers might be reserved temporarily without prior notice for the entity that funded them when necessary.
About the costs¶
Access is free of charge, but storage space is limited, and access might be reserved periodically to the funding entity.