Your Desktop

The Observatory has a standard Linux Workstation of which the configuration is updated regularly. The major aim for this Workstation is to provide you with ample computer resources on your desk for most of you daily scientific work. For extremely heavy computing we have an HPC cluster, special purpose science servers and a Bulk Storage environment.

The current standard hardware configuration is:

Dell Inc. Precision 3660 Tower
One Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900 CPU @ 5.60 GHz (16 core/ 32 HT)
32GB RAM
1 256GB SSD drive with Fedora Core OS
3 4TB disks in RAID5 configuration, = 7.7 TB formatted space
(2) 27" 2560x1440 Screen

The actual disk configuration is as follows:

/data1 175 GB on the SSD
/data2 7.7TB RAID5 on the 3 4TB disks

Before you can actually use your Workstation you need to realize that you are in a networked environment. This means that your desktop computer contributes to the whole of Observatory computing and that it provides you a personal entry point from remote.

You have at your disposal a small (standard 4GB) home directory which is backed up daily as system level. This home directory resides on a central server, so access from your desktop to this home directory will always be over the network. Inside your home directory there are several required directories that are there by default. there are the Maildir directory that stores all your mail folders (not the inbox) and the pblic_html directory that stores your personal web stack.

The home directory is there for you to store important information you never want to loose. But is is rather small in size as we cannot affort to backup the sum of all users home directories when that exceeds practical size limits. To store your science data you should use the local disk structure, e.g. /data2 for saving data securely.

The data on the local /data1 and /data2 disks are not backed up anywhere. If you wish to add this extra layer of safety, you can order a USB external disk drive/bay to store off-line copies of your data. Please email to bestellingen@strw.leidenuniv.nl an order request.

On the network there are several storage devices to save data you are not using temporarily. Each group at the Observatory has a set of such disks. Please contact your group member for details.

Your data disks are available over the network, from each and every Workstation at the Observatory through the following mechanism.

 /net/<machinename>/data#

where <machinename> is the name of the Workstation the disks are physically situated in and # is the number of the attached logical disk. So for Workstation watertje and its local disk /data7 you access its content through:

/net/watertje/data7

Because of remote logins and remote disk access, the Linux desktops should always be left on. Not only for your convenience and that of your co-workers with whom you may share data on the disk, but also to allow system maintainance and updates.

Currently, our desktops run Linux (Fedora 27) and/or Windows 10.