servers and clients

The CS Labs contain about 30 Linux workstations, which we sometimes refer to as clients or client spices. We also have a machine room which houses allspice, one of our servers. Allspice acts as a disk server (among other things), in that some of it's disks are shared to the client machines. For example, your home directory is really located on one of allspice's disks, and is exported or shared to each of the clients. This means, no matter which client machine you use, you will always see the same files of your home directory when you log in.

Most commands, like mail (mutt or pine) and applications in /usr/local/bin, should work the same on the clients and the servers. Some commands (like who or top) will only show you what is happening on that particular client workstation (i.e., not what is happening on the server allspice).

Running a program on a workstation uses that workstation's CPU and memory. This can be useful, if for instance, you need to run a long simulation, and the server is already loaded down with users and processes (use top to see how busy any particular machine is). In general, we encourage you to run any long simulations on a client rather than allspice. The clients are probably faster (have faster CPUs), and have a smaller load on them. If you run your long simulation from one of the /local directories on the clients, then you can also avoid the slower network disk access to allspice.

Use the following commands to find out any client machine's CPU speed, amount of memory, current load, and free disk space: