Other user SSHed from my hardware

Question

While logged into our HPC cluster I used w to check out who else was logged in. I happened to notice that it looks like there's another user logged in from my (personal) computer;

19:04:47 up 40 days,  6:39, 44 users,  load average: 0.10, 0.14, 0.18
USER            TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
ME             pts/4    zerg.neuron12. 18:55    0.00s  0.09s  0.04s w  
SOMEONE_ELSE   pts/35   zerg.neuron12. Sat14    2:27m  0.08s  0.08s -bash

Is this something I should be worried out - I tried to kill the other session but had a permission denied message. Is it possible we just both have the same hardware name? I'd have thought that if this were the case the server would give one of us a different name (e.g. zerg1) when we logged in to prevent confusion.

This is not an area I have any experience with, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

When you say "my" hardware, I'm assuming you mean the workstation assigned to you by your employer. Most larger institutions employ sysadmins who are responsible for administering a cluster of machines, in which case it's typical to have each workstation set up to authenticate against a centralized directory. If that's so, then it's often the case that anyone with an account on that cluster is able to log into any workstation (including yours), so there's probably nothing to worry about.