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Compute servers
Compute servers
To run software that takes hours, days or weeks to finish, use a compute server.
There are several of them:
For undergraduate and MSc students
ssh student.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk
For postgraduate research students
ssh -l user user.pgr.inf.ed.ac.uk
where user should be replaced by your DICE username - for example:
ssh -l s1234567 s1234567.pgr.inf.ed.ac.uk
Although there are several of these servers, please use only the one which this address takes you to.
For staff, visitors and postgraduate research students
ssh staff.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk
Note also that research institutes have dedicated compute servers available, you will need explicit permission to access those systems. To find out what is available talk to your supervisor or colleagues.
Access
The compute servers are only accessible from within the Informatics network. If you are outside of the School (that includes being on eduroam or other parts of the University network) you must either connect to an external login server via SSH or use the Informatics VPN rather than the University service.
File storage
You can access your DICE AFS filespace from the compute servers, as you can from every DICE computer. You can also make a directory in /disk/scratch - but please remember that this directory will only be accessible on that computer, and that /disk/scratch is not backed up.
Tips
Use the longjob command when your job will run for longer than 18 hours.
There are also powerful computing clusters.