The CS Labs contain about 150 Linux workstations, which we sometimes refer to as clients, client machines, or lab machines. We also have a machine room which houses allspice and our other servers.
allspice is a disk server – some of its 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.
Since allspice is our disk (and email) server, it is already doing a lot. You should never need to log in to allspice, and certainly never run jobs on allspice. Running a program on a workstation uses that workstation’s CPU and memory. The clients are faster (have faster CPUs), and have a smaller load on them, so your job will probably run faster on the clients. Additionally, if you run your jobs from one of the /local directories, on the clients, then you can avoid the slower network disk access to allspice.
See our machine specs page, to figure out which client machines have the most memory, disk, or the fastest/best CPUs/GPUs. Or try the following commands on a specific client:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/meminfo
nvidia-smi
uptime
top (1 to toggle showing cores, q to quit)
df -h -t ext4