The GCC Compile farm project maintains machines of various architectures and provides SSH access to free software developers, GCC and others (GPL, BSD, MIT, ...).
Once your account application is approved (see the Request an account page), you get full SSH access to all the farm machines, current and future.
For more information about usage, see the wiki page of the project.
We have been monitoring most farm machines with munin for some time. This allows anyone to check whether a machine is heavily loaded or not before starting to use it, but it is time-consuming to check many graphs from several machines.
To quickly see the load of a machine, we now display a usage bar directly in the list of machines! We currently show 3 metrics: CPU usage, memory usage, and disk I/O load. The values are based on the last 48 hours of munin data and should give a good overview of current usage and expected performance.
Nethertheless, these values are indicative and only reflect the average usage. If you plan to use a machine for heavy tasks, you should check the munin graphs to better understand the usage pattern and make sure you don't disrupt the tasks of existing users. In addition, a few values are missing or incorrect: this happens either because the machine was not recently monitored by munin, or because the total number of CPU is incorrectly detected.
The value displayed in the usage bars is computed as a weighted average that gives more importance to high usage values. For instance:
In each case, the arithmetic average would be the same (20% usage). However, we consider that the machine is more loaded in the third case. Intuitively, if you would like to run a new task, using a machine that is already 100% busy (even only 20% of the time) is generally a bad idea: the new task might significantly interfere with the existing ones. In contrast, a machine that is 20% busy still has a lot of room for more tasks.
We are happy to announce that a new IBM server has been added to the farm, thanks to OSUOSL!
This POWER9 server extends the already available IBM hardware in the compile farm: POWER7 (gcc110, gcc111) and POWER8 (gcc112, gcc119). It features 128 CPU cores and 256 GB of RAM, as well as a high-performance I/O setup with 8 disks in a RAID5 configuration. Disk I/O was the main bottleneck for the existing POWER machines, so hopefully this new machine will provide much better performance in practice.
It is already possible to connect to this new machine through SSH at gcc135.fsffrance.org.
gcc123 recently suffered from a disk failure, just a few months after being operational. Today, OSUOSL changed the disk and reinstalled the machine. Because there is no RAID on this machine, any user data stored on the machine was lost.
This is a good opportunity to remind that the compile farm is "best effort": we make no promise whatsover about data integrity, so make sure to always have a copy of your important work somewhere else!
The SSH host keys of gcc123 have been restored, so SSH access should work just fine with the reinstalled system.