Resources
The department maintains a number of computing resources for the use of students, faculty, and visitors. The primary operating system is GNU/Linux, with the standard distribution being CentOS 5, a community rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.
Accounts are available to people who are sponsored by a faculty member or who are participating in a class that requires an account. See the account policy page for more information about obtaining an account.
Scientific Computing Lab (Olin B143)
The department's main computing center is the Scientific Computing Lab, which is also used as a classroom. The lab contains twelve 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo machines with 4 GB of RAM.
We run CentOS 5, a rebuild of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux product, which is more stable than the Fedora releases. We supplement the included packages with our own locally built packages, giving us a custom distribution with less overhead.
Accessing these machines is most easily done by SSHing to shell.math.hmc.edu, which
will connect you to a machine chosen by round-robin. If you really
want to connect to a specific machine, try
crispo,
daceyville,
findthee,
gaskin,
hepplewhite,
jerakeen,
keel,
mossie,
nosher,
organdy,
rumblelow, or
selachii
.
Compute Server
ponder is a dual-Xeon system with 12 GB of RAM for projects requiring large amounts of memory.
Parallel-Computing Systems
We operate two parallel-computing systems that can be used for special research projects or classes. Access is restricted to people who have obtained permission to use these systems.
hex is a sixteen-core (eight dual-core processors)
AMD Opteron system, with 32 GB of RAM. The machine is a TYAN
Transport VX50 with a four-socket TYAN
Thunder K8QW (S4881) mainboard and an M4881
daughterboard supporting an additional four processors and their
RAM. There are eight dual-core, 64-bit 2.0 GHz AMD Opteron 870
processors. Each CPU has two 2 GB RAM modules, for a total of 32 GB
of RAM in the system. There is room for expansion up to 64 GB of
RAM through the addition of two more 2 GB RAM modules per CPU.
pex is a 32-core (four eight-core processors) AMD
Opteron system, with 128 GB of RAM. There are four eight-core,
64-bit 2.4 GHz AMD Opteron 6136 processors.
LaTeX Classes
The department has developed several LaTeX class files for use in creating various documents used for classes.
More information is available on our LaTeX support page.
Mirror Server
mirror.hmc.edu provides mirrors of some free or
open-source operating systems, including CentOS, the
latest release and development tree for Fedora Core, and Debian GNU/Linux.
We also have a local mirror of CTAN, the “Comprehensive TeX Archive Network”, which includes everything you'd need to run TeX and LaTeX, from TeX systems for various operating systems, through documentation, and on to LaTeX packages that provide obscure functionality.
Additional Servers
In addition to our user-accessible systems, we operate a number of server systems to which access is restricted to systems staff.
