A system called Ganglia can be used to view the status of the Aster compute nodes. Ganglia has a graphical and a command-line interface. To view the graphical interface simply go to the following website:
Tentakel is a utility for running commands in parallel on the aster nodes. Tentakel might be useful for diagnosing problems or running short tests. For long running jobs you must use condor or SGE. Jobs run outside of Condor or SGE will be terminated after 30 minutes.