Astronomy machines

These are managed by Norman Gray.

Sketchy notes...

The set of astronomy usernames is distinct from the usernames in the rest of the department (because history).

Files are shared through NFS: home, data and scratch directories are visible on multiple machines, but the following patterns are maintained:

/home/username : your ‘home’ files are the most valuable ones, containing papers, theses, software, but typically not data, unless this location is the only source of that data. The /home directories are backed up nightly. You should not store a lot of data in /home, even temporarily: anything approaching 100 GB is a lot; above 200GB is significantly more than your fair share.
/data : the ‘data’ directories are named either after machines or, more typically, after function, and are generally specific to particular groups of people within the group. These are not backed up, but the machines on which they live are managed carefully.
/scratch/machinename : the ‘scratch’ directories are not backed up, and are local to a particular machine, thus the local storage on machine foo is available across the network as directory /scratch/foo. Ideally, you will read and write data on local storage, since this is fastest and stresses the network least. The scratch directories are not backed up.

At present (early 2017) the /data directories are in a state of some disarray; they should be regularised somewhat in the next few months.

Machines to use §

Only a few machines are visible for ssh login off-campus (in principle only one, but there are some not-yet-extinguished exceptions). There are instructions elsewhere for connecting from off-campus.

The workhorse astronomy machine is helios.astro. There are various other compute machines ‘owned’ by one or other research project.