These are the machines on which users should run such programs as: web browsers, mail clients, newsreaders, X window managers, text editors/word processors, and miscellaneous applications such as clocks, calendars, and so on.
Large processing jobs should not be run on the application servers, but should instead be run on a compute server. Jobs that are using excessive computing resources on application servers may be killed by CSLab staff to improve the performance of users that depend on these machines for their desktop environment.
Our application servers are all Dell 2950 systems, running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS in 32-bit mode for compatibility with a variety of applications. They are all Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers with two quad-core Intel E5355 CPUs and 8GB of RAM.
Please note that although most software on the application servers should be available as part of the packages provided by the OS vendor, some software which is provided by alternate sources may reside in /opt. You should consider setting your PATH or using aliases to make running software in /opt easier; your PoC can assist you with this.
If a desired (but not installed) package is available as part of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, contact your PoC and have them put in a request that it be added to core software. Unfortunately, due to the need to keep the software on core servers manageable, such requests may need to be reviewed by the departmental computing committee (DCC).
Note further that in order to keep the computational resources of application servers available for the their intended role of providing desktop computing to our users, only software appropriate for application servers will be installed on those servers. For compute-intensive software such as Matlab, please use the linux compute servers instead.
With respect to software that is neither available via the OS distribution-provided package list nor in /opt, you or your Point of Contact (POC) can install programs in your home directory or a suitable work partition for use on these servers, so long as the programs do not require Administrator/root privileges to install or run.
apps0.cs.toronto.edu: a9:95:4c:31:22:32:8a:0a:ae:5c:7b:b3:1d:39:b1:17
apps1.cs.toronto.edu: 93:a9:49:fa:9d:2b:3d:6e:02:14:e2:91:e9:49:24:09
apps2.cs.toronto.edu: cc:d2:76:68:e9:60:3d:f1:f2:3b:2a:41:43:74:a7:ff
apps3.cs.toronto.edu: d6:e4:9b:1a:d1:74:37:9f:d7:2e:68:97:61:eb:1f:76
Note that the DNS name cs.toronto.edu now points to apps0, so if you ssh into cs.toronto.edu you might get a warning from your SSH client regarding a RSA host key mismatch, depending on whether or not you have ever connected to cs.toronto.edu from your local machine in the past. See this page for more information.
The bottom line is that, since cs.toronto.edu now points to apps0, if you see the RSA key fingerprint of apps0 (see above) when you try to connect to cs.toronto.edu, then you most likely have nothing to fear.