Just before the shutdown we replaced some lab machines with desktops with lower spec GPUs These are elitedesk 800 g4s with gtx 1060 cards which can be used for development work and for short or small scale processing. Please do not run long jobs on them or your jobs will be killed. Physically the machines […]

Earlier this year we conducted a survey of VM/cloud usage. The project has now concluded and a formal report on the project can be found on the Rat Unit wiki This includes a link to the survey report itself. Copies of all the documentation relating to the project can be found in afs in the […]

With the upgrade to Sl6.4 we have opted not to upgrade the gridengine based beowulf cluster and this service is now decommissioned. The hardware is now fairly elderly and ECDF/Eddie provides an equivalent service with better resources for high thoughput computing. The recent splintering of the gridengine software with Oracle bringing the standard release back […]

An overview of what browsers are available on DICE

For anyone looking to provide an SSL certified service IS (through JANET) can provide COMODO certified certificates which are valid for 1,2 or 3 years. The certificates can only be used for non commercial or financial purposes and are signed by a C.A. which is available in most web browsers. If you want to make […]

SL6 is the first upgrade of DICE we’ve done since we removed the last of the Schools Solaris servers. Given we’re unlikely to be buying more we’ve done some spring cleaning on the PATH, MANPATH and various other environmental variables. If you manipulate your PATH via .benv and setpath/pathfix you may find that it’s different […]

With the DICE SL6 upgrade we will be formally decommissioning the schools two Condor pools over this summer. Condor is a system for stealing unused cpu cycles from distributed commodity computers for use as a High Throughput Computing platform. For some years we have been running condor on all the lab machines and a number […]

We often get asked to install Dropbox on DICE, it hasn’t happened before now, mostly for reasons that are probably too long and boring to go into on the systems blog (but if you’re interested). However if you have hand crafted an install on DICE or are using it you may want to be aware […]