This article and the several accompanying articles in this newsletter describe our current situation and plans for the cluster. Hopefully these will give you some information about how to utilize the central Unix cluster effectively and how to avoid some of the more common pitfalls. Furthermore, there are differences among the vendors and their implementations of the compilers, for example, that mean that one needs to be aware of the machine you are using. The advice for the latter users is to pick one flavor of computer and ignore the rest of the cluster. This typically reduces your choice of computers to one of a couple of largely interchangeable systems.
Batch jobs are typically CPU intensive or production class jobs.
The ratings numbers shown above were determined using a program called TINY, a physics Monte Carlo and reconstruction program taken from a Fermilab experiment. The convention has largely been ignored in the past but will be used regularly in the future. Towards this end, interactive logins to fibb01 will be disabled in the future when another interactive machine becomes available. Users who require the IBM environment should switch to using the explicit name of one of the IBM machines. Which physical machine this is may change from time to time, but we expect this to be no more frequent than quarterly and will try to minimize these disruptions.