FarmShare, Stanford’s shared computing environment, provides Linux facilities for general and research computing to anyone with a full-service SUNet ID.
Environments
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.
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.
Getting started
Users are required to connect remotely. See Logging in to shared UNIX workstations for instructions.
