Setting up the Working Environment

First Knowledge

• The list of high-performance computing systems at JAIST can be found here.
• Almost settings for your account can be changed by logging into server sparc1 from the internal network.
• The default shell for user is tcsh.
• Password used for logging into these servers is the same with your email password. Be careful!

Shell Interpreter

If you are not familiar with tcsh, you can change it to bash easily. Please note that I would prefer to use tcsh in all of my posts.

1. Log in to sparc1.
2. Check out your current information.
   % finger $USER
3. Change the default shell.
   % passwd -r ldap -e
   Enter /bin/bash as the new shell.
4. Confirm the change.
   % finger $USER

It may take a while for the change can be used.

Make Your Own Work Space

Almost systems has a very big directory /work for storing your temporary data used in computation process. This directory is locally available to the each cluster and shared with nodes inside the cluster. You should make your own directory, such as /work/$USER, and copy your applications as well as required data to there for computation. You should remove them after the computation to make the free space available for other users.

% mkdir /work/$USER

For easily in usage, I often set a environment variable WORK to point it to /work/$USER whenever possible.

% echo 'test -d /work/$USER && setenv WORK /work/$USER && cd $WORK' >> /home/$USER/.cshrc

Log out and log in again to check the effect.

If you want a more complicated settings, you can check out my .cshrc.

For the purpose of custom installation, we should create a directory for storing source packages.

% mkdir /work/$USER/setup