Beast Cluster

The Beast Cluster is a Dell blade server:

32 nodes: 2x Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2350 2GHz, 20 GBytes RAM, 1 Gbit/sec ethernet

Total CPUs (cores): 32 x 2 x 4 = 256

Getting Access

The Beast Cluster doesn't have a public IP address, but it is still accessible through the ECE cluster from outside of Whittemore. From outside Whittemore first connect to the ECE Cluster and run the commands for accessing the Beast Cluster from a Unix based operating system on the ECE cluster machine.

Accessing the Beast Cluster from a Windows Operating System

• In order to access the CVL from a Windows system, you must have a SSH client. ECE supports PuTTY as our SSH client.

• To download, install, and setup these programs follow this short tutorial.

PuTTY tutorial

• In order to copy and transfer files to and from your ECE account(e.g. Matlab scripts, data files for processing, etc), you must use a program similar to SSH for transferring files. One very simple application that can be used is called WinSCP. The WinSCP homepage has either a full installation package, or just a single executable file on its download page.

Accessing the Beast Cluster from a Unix Based Operating System

1. To access the Beast Cluster from a Unix or Mac OS X system just open a terminal and type:

 ssh -X cvl.ece.vt.edu

2. From that machine you can ssh into the Beast cluster with the below IP address, where # = 1 through 32.

  ssh -X 172.16.9.#

3. Use the user name and password that you created from the ECE Account creation page.

4. To copy files to your home directory on the Beast Cluster use the command:

  scp -r myfile 172.16.9.#:

Or: to get "myfile" from your home directory on the Beast Cluster, use the command:

  scp -r 172.16.9.#:myfile ~

The files will be copied to your home directory on your local machine.