Welcome to Gates b02 cluster
Open 24 hours. CS department has precedence over usage.
The Gates b02 cluser is located in the bottom of the Gates building,
across the hall from the large lecture room b01. A valid Leland ID is
required to use the cluster. The drives are erased regularly, so don't save
your work there -- use MacLeland to store your files when you are finished
(details below).
The Goal of Gates b02
The Gates b02 cluster is not an official public cluster. It was
created by the CS department for use in teaching computer science.
It is provided "as is" as a service to the Stanford community as a
whole. As such, do not expect a full service cluster environment.
If you are looking for assistance or a larger variety of software,
try visiting the Tresidder or Meyer computer clusters. That being
said, we will attempt to make this cluster useful to you.
Cluster Priorities
-
The CS Department: The CS department has
first priority over this room. If the department needs the
room for any reason, you may be kicked off the computers
immediately. Some classes, such as CS 105, may teach sections
in this room. Other classes may hold office hours here.
If necessary, you will be asked to leave the cluster at these times.
The department's schedule for this room will generally be posted
on the door, though its use is not limited to events posted.
-
Students in CS classes: A student doing work
for a Stanford CS class has priority over those using the
cluster for other reasons (such as for classes in other
majors, for e-mail, etc). If you are using the cluster for
such purposes and notice people waiting, we ask that you
please finish what you are doing and find another place to
work. Also, if you are using one of the faster computers, you
should be willing to trade computers if someone requires more
computing power (for instance, if you are using Thetis and a
CS 108 students needs to use Powerplant).
-
Students doing work for other Stanford
classes: Class work always takes priority over
recreational uses.
-
Students using the cluster for recreation (e-mail,
etc): Recreational use is allowed, but is lowest
priority.
Saving Your Work
This cluster uses "Assimilator" to keep the hard drives of the
computers clean and to install new software. As this is a public
cluster, NON-STANDARD SOFTWARE AND PERSONAL DOCUMENTS ARE ERASED
FROM THESE COMPUTERS during assimilaton. Do not save your work on
these computers, as it will be erased. Bring a disk or use
a file sever.
Please do not remove or disable assimilator from these computers.
While doing so is not difficult, it makes our job harder. We have
attempted to make assimilator as non-intrusive as possible. It is
one of the best ways to keep the computers healthy in a 24 hour
cluster. If we have problems with people disabling assimilator,
we may have to close the cluster every night in order to clean and
update the hard drives.
Software
The software on these computers consists of applications requested
by the CS department for use by students in its courses. This
includes programming tools, telnet, and web access. Word
processing programs were intentionally not included on these
computers. These computers are not intended for typing up papers.
If you find software missing from this cluster that you think
should be on it, please use the contact info below to let us
know.
Printing
You may have noticed that there are no printing facilities in this
cluster. This is unfortunate, but we do not have the resources to
provide printing at this time. Our appologies for this
inconvenience.
Xenon access
The current solution for accessing xenon from these computers is
to telnet to a leland workstation (such as an elaine) and then do
a "ssh xenon" to access xenon. This will provide you with an
secure and encrypted session to xenon.
Contact Info
There is no consulting staff for the Gates b02 cluster. All
questions and comments should be directed to:
gates-b02-admin@cs.stanford.edu
Last modified: Wed Sep 23 00:46:11 PDT 1998