Accessing and Using Lewis

The UMBC operates a cluster of Dell 1850 dual core compute servers known as lewis, named after Meriwether Lewis of the Corp of Discovery Expedition. The fully qualified registered name for lewis is

lewis.rnet.missouri.edu

In order to log in to lewis, you must use a client that supports the SSH version 2 protocol. Telnet access is not allowed. Windows users can download the SSH Secure Shell program from this site. SecureCRT and PuTTY are examples of other Windows programs that support the SSH version 2 protocol. If you use a Unix workstation, you will need to install/upgrade to SSH version 2 if you have not already done so.

The following restrictions are in effect when accessing lewis:

Telnet access is not allowed. You must use an SSH version 2 client.
Access via rsh, rlogin, and rexec are not allowed.
FTP connections from remote systems into lewis are not allowed. Remote file transfer connections must be initiated using a secure FTP (SFTP) client program that authenticates to the server using SSH version 2. Unix systems with SSH version 2 installed can execute the sftp program. The SSH Secure Shell program for Windows available from this site also supports SFTP.
There is no anonymous FTP on lewis.

A user is allocated 2.5 GB of storage in the home directory. In addition, 50 GB of storage is allocated under the /data directory which is found in the home directory.

The operating system on lewis is Platform Rocks Linux 4.0 (based on Redhat Linux).

You must submit long-running jobs to the LSF workload management system. The LSF scheduler will automatically distribute jobs across the nodes of the cluster, based upon availability of resources and system load. For information about how to submit jobs to LSF, see Submitting Jobs via LSF on Lewis.

Please be aware that the lewis system "evolves" as needed to accomodate workload demands. Configurations, options, and restrictions may change as additional software is installed and usage increases. Further documentation on lewis usage policies and procedures will be developed as required.