Sometimes you need to run software which needs a lot of oomph behind it, and which can take days to run. It’s a bit impractical to run that sort of thing on a normal desktop – which is why Informatics has compute servers.

Until recently there was one for staff (called staff.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk) and one for students (called student.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk). Postgraduate research students were able to use both of these.

However, we noticed that both machines were being heavily loaded with postgrad research student jobs, so we’ve provided several more compute servers. These ones are especially for the use of postgrad research students.

If you’re a postgrad research student, you can login to a new compute server like this:

ssh yourusername.pgr.inf.ed.ac.uk

… where yourusername is your DICE username, for example s1234567:

ssh s1234567.pgr.inf.ed.ac.uk

Edit: That command will work if you’re logging in from a DICE machine, but if you’re logging in from your own machine, you’ll also need to specify your DICE username, like this:

ssh -l yourusername yourusername.pgr.inf.ed.ac.uk

… where yourusername is your DICE username.

There are several of these new servers. Please use only the one which your pgr.inf.ed.ac.uk address takes you to, to be fair to your fellow students.

Now that the postgrad research students have their own compute servers, student.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk is reserved for taught students (undergraduate and MSc).

There’s a help page about compute servers at: https://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/compute-servers.

New student compute servers / Computing Systems by is licensed under a