Introduction to ISD Unix Services and Support |
Unix Support
ISD supports two flavours of Unix: Solaris, from Sun Microsystems; Linux, the well-known open-source Unix clone.
Solaris
All Unix services administered by ISD which are available for general use run Solaris and these are fully-supported. We also offer some support for the many Sun SPARC Stations which run Solaris in departments around campus --- though departmental computer-officers should be consulted first.
We have a site-licence for Solaris --- users can borrow installation disks from the ISD Helpdesk, by advance arrangement, for their own use. Disks are available for both Sun SPARC and Intel x86 platforms.
Linux
Linux is a free (as in beer) and open-source (free as in speech) clone of Unix. ISD offers partial support for Linux.
Universe: Cosmos and Eric
ISD administers the Universe Unix system on behalf of users. Universe is actually a loose, non-homogeneous cluster of machines; at present the cluster consists of Cosmos and Eric.
Users who obtain a Unix account through ISD will usually simply receive a "Universe account" and should login to <username>.unix.umist.ac.uk (replace <username> with your username) with their eUMIST username and password. Advanced users who wish to access a particular machine, will usually be accommodated.
Several departments also run Unix machines and clusters. Users should contact departmental representatives for details.
Universe: Cosmos
Cosmos is an 8-processor Sun Microsystems machine available to all for running applications and for programme development. Interactive running of short computationally-intensive jobs (3 -- 4 hours) is tolerated; longer jobs must be run under the NQS batch/queue system.
Universe: Eric
Eric is a 30-processor Sun Microsystems machine with 30 Gbytes of RAM. Eric was previously available only to members of research groups involved in a JREI bit which funded its purchase. However, it is now available to all staff and students. It is suited to long-running computationally-intensive jobs, particularly those requiring a lot of memory.