The C&IS science-oriented Unix computer called Capstan was recently taken out of service, but its services have been taken over by Mercury. The Science and Engineering Computing Facility (SECF) developed Capstan to provide Mathematica, Matlab, and other scientific software to the Yale community. Capstan operated as a member of the Minerva cluster, sharing accounts and home directories, but it used older hardware that was unreliable in this service.
The Mercury system (part of the "Pantheon" -- Minerva, Mercury, and Morpheus) now has the distinction of providing the scientific software formerly on Capstan. Mercury is a 4-processor Sun SparcCenter 1000. Users may connect to any of these systems for e-mail (choosing the one with the lightest load), but users who need one of the scientific applications must specify Mercury.
Mercury is suitable for jobs that take up to several hours of CPU time shared with general interactive users. Users who want to run longer jobs for research or special projects should contact SECF (secf@yale.edu or 432-4243). SECF has a number of options including a local high-performance IBM Unix cluster and access to external national supercomputing facilities at Pittsburgh and Cornell.