Unix Host Machines
Many Machines
We have several different Unix machines in the department. Most of
the time, you don't have to worry about which one you should use; they
should all look the same once you log in. At present, our primary
hosts are named earth, wind, and, and fire.
The machine named and is designated for computationally intensive
jobs. If you are doing research that requires hours or days of CPU
time, and is the place you are expected to run your programs.
One Account
Even though we have different machines, they all share parts of the
same filesystem. This means that if you write a program on one
machine, then log in on another machine the next day, it should look
like the file is in the same place even though you are working on a
different machine.
The same username and password should let you log in on any of our
machines.
Linux Operating System
Our primary Unix hosts are running Linux. Linux is a free Unix-like
operating system that has received a lot of support from the computer
science community. Since it's free, you can get a copy of Linux and
put it on a home PC if you like.