Servers

🖥️ Servers for Dynaroars Lab

Servers Specs

Our lab has two servers. They will always run GNU/Linux Debian Stable.

1. 👽 ALIENWARE (lli-debu.me, port 7022)

   • Alienware Aurora
     • CPU: 16 cores, 24 threads, 5.20GHz (Intel 12th Gen Core i9-12900KF)
     • Graphic: Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti 12GB RAM
     • Memory: 64GB RAM
   • This system is ideal for experiments that need very fast CPU (but not lots of core) and fast GPU.

2. 🦖 DYNAROARS (lli-debu.me, port 5022)

   • Lenovo ThinkStation P620
     • CPU: 64 cores, 128 threads, 4.3GHz (AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX)
     • Graphic: Nvidia RTX 4090 RTX 24GB RAM
     • Memory: 128GB RAM
   • This system is ideal for projects that can leverage many cores and specialized GPU.
     

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IMPORTANT

⚠️ DO NOT install any thing other than Debian stable packages to these computers (e.g., do not mix unstable or new repositories to apt sources list). You can download and install anything in your home (local) directory. If in doubt, contact us.

Getting an account

• To get an account on the server, send us a request and your SSH public key (for password-less log in)
• After your account is created, we will send you information to log in. This includes your username USERNAME and instructions to log in

Log in

• Do the following on your machine that has the SSH public key you sent:
  • You can simply type ssh USERNAME@HOSTNAME -p PORTNUMBER and you should automatically log in
  • Or, you can add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file

Host SomeName
    Hostname HOSTNAME
    Port PORTNUMBER
    User USERNAME

After this, you can type ssh SomeName from the command line to automatically log in (you should not get asked to enter password).

Here's a concrete example

Host DYNAROARS
     HostName lli-debu.me
     Port 5022
     User guestz
     IdentityFile ~/.ssh/NAMEKEY

Now you can type ssh DYNAROARS to log in. Note in this example we use IdentifyFile to specify a specific ssh public key. This is useful if you have lots of public keys.

Useful stuff

Copying files to the server

If you have added the server to your ssh config as above, then you can simply use the following command to copy stuff to your home directory:

scp <local_file> DYNAROARS:~

If you do not wish to add the server to your ssh config, use the command below (the -P flag is case-sensitive!):

scp -P <port_number>  <local_file> <you_username>@lli-debu.me

Others

1. You can use an IDE such as VSCode to do remote development on these servers (just connect to the server via the builtin remote login method in VSCode). You can also use other editors that support remote development (e.g., Emac + TRAMP).
2. Do take advantage of the multicores these machine have. Most programming languages support multiprocessing (e.g., Python) and can significantly reduce program runtime.
3. Periodically check /var/tmp or /tmp/ to make sure you are not taking too much space there.