Welcome to FarmShare

FarmShare is Stanford’s community computing environment. It is intended for use in coursework and unsponsored research. It is not approved for use with high-risk data, or for use in sponsored research.

FarmShare evolved from the old, public UNIX cluster, once located on the second floor of Sweet Hall, which was itself a successor to systems like the University’s original timeshare service, LOTS. The latest iteration of FarmShare with hardware and major OS update came online early 2024.

Resources on FarmShare are focused on making it easier to learn how to use research computing including “scheduler” or “distributed resource management system” to submit compute jobs. By using FarmShare, new researchers can more easily adapt to using larger clusters when they have big projects that involve using federally funded resources, shared Stanford clusters, or on a small grant funded cluster. Full SUNet (or sponsorship) required.

Cluster Components

FarmShare consists of three classes of servers:

  • The rice servers are login nodes where you log in to run commands, access files, submit jobs, and review results. The rice servers also have access to Stanford AFS. These servers can be used for interactive work, but some resource limits are enforced, so if you need to run a long-running or compute- and/or memory-intensive process you should submit a job. Remember, these are servers for research and academic use, not for administrative or business functions.

  • The iron, rye and wheat servers are compute nodes. They have more CPU power and more memory than the rice servers, and are meant for both interactive jobs (where you log in to control what happens) and batch jobs (where everything runs from a script that you submit). Some wheat and iron nodes also have significantly more memory than others. Like the rice servers, these are available for use for coursework or research purposes.

  • The oat servers are GPU compute nodes. They are similar to the compute nodes mentioned above, except that they also have GPUs installed. These nodes are meant for computational academic or research work that is able to take advantage of a GPU (e.g., TensorFlow jobs fit into this category).

All FarmShare servers run Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

FarmShare currently has 4 rice servers (login nodes) along with 26 compute nodes (wheat, iron, oat nodes).

Eligibility

FarmShare is available to anyone who has a full-service SUNetID. A full-service SUNetID is one that has email service; if you can successfully get to Stanford Webmail, then you are eligible to use FarmShare for academic work and small research jobs! If you do not already have a full-service SUNetID (maybe because you are a visiting researcher), you can get a sponsored full-service SUNetID. Read more about SUNetID levels.

Note that, in order to get a sponsored SUNetID, a monthly fee will be charged by University IT. Only people with spending authority may sponsor a SUNetID. Sponsorships can be obtained and paid for through Sponsorship Manager. Current rates are available from the Sponsored Account Rates page.

FarmShare is meant for low- or moderate-risk data, and is primarily intended for class work and for other general- and personal-use work (research and training). It is not meant for sponsored research (where you have a dedicated source of funding), and is not approved for handling high-risk data.

If you are doing sponsored or departmental research, then FarmShare might not be the right place for you. Instead, if the data you are working with is all low-risk, then you should consider getting access to our Sherlock Cluster! The Sherlock web site has more information about how to get access.

Getting Help

Most FarmShare support is provided during business hours, either via email or during academic-year office hours.

For email support, send a message to srcc-support. Make sure you have “FarmShare” somewhere in the subject line, and please be as detailed as possible with your request.