The clusters are available via Secure Shell (SSH) to all who have an EECE Kerberos / AFS account. Please contact the Departmental System Administrator for an EECE Kerberos / AFS account if necessary.

Your AFS home directory will also be your home directory on the cluster nodes. Undergraduate and postgraduate students can use any of the EECE lab computers to access the clusters. Staff members will typically use their office computers to access the clusters, but may also use the lab computers. Access to the clusters is also possible from off-campus using the pass-through server, see External / Off-campus Access.

The cluster machines are configured to transparently transfer user Kerberos / AFS credentials and therefore provide a single sign-on environment. In other words, you only have to type your password once.

Connect (on campus) to the batch scheduler head node alpha1-1.ee.up.ac.za. If you are logging in from wiener (or any machine in our department), you need only use the hostname (i.e. alpha1-1).

Connection can be established from any Linux machine running SSH, and X Windows if graphical programs must be run. Files can be transferred to / from the cluster head node using “scp” or “sftp” (included with the SSH package). Note that if you are planning on running graphical programs, you must ssh to the head node using “ssh -Y alpha1-1”. The extra “-Y” enables X11 forwarding on the SSH channel.

Alternatively, a Windows with Pass-though X2GO Configuration can be used.

After you have connected, you have a shell on the node (similar to a “dos box” on Windows). Unix commands and applications can be entered and executed similarly to how you would in Windows. See the section Unix Commands Summary for a summary of the basic commands available.