Skip to content Skip to site navigation

Shared Computing Environment

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.

Get started

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

Learn more

Last modified April 21, 2017