The first thing you should do is get an account on the astro compute cluster. Follow the instructions here:
You have to log in through the gateway machine first (rssh.rcf.bnl.gov) and then
into the login node (astro.rcf.bnl.gov).
See Working with SSH through the RCF gateway for a tutorial on how to
make life simpler.
Once you log in, you should add the following to your startup script ~/.bashrc for bash
or csh/tcsh respectively:
source ~astrodat/setup/setup.sh
source ~astrodat/setup/setup.csh
That file defines the location of data on our system. e.g.
$DESDATA # location of DES data on the system
$BOSS_ROOT # location of BOSS data on the system
$PHOTO_SWEEP # location of BOSS sweep catalogs.
etc. It also sets the http_proxy and ftp_proxy needed to access remote sites.
Using the wq batch system
We use wq to handle job submission to cluster. Source one of these files to make
wq available
source ~astrodat/setup/setup-wq.sh
source ~astrodat/setup/setup-wq.csh
See this page for details.
https://github.com/esheldon/wq
Erin Sheldon and Anze Slosar are the authors of wq, so contact them for
detailed questions
There are many software packages and compilers available on each system. We install additional packages of our own.
These are typically newer versions of system software (e.g. newer versions of python) and software that is changing
rapidly, such as numerical python.
To access the global software installs:
source /opt/astro/SL53/bin/setup.astro.sh
a somewhat up-to-date list of the software is listed at here.
Modules
Other software updates more rapidly, and we want to be able to select a version we want. We use modules
for software setup. Put this in your startup bash or csh/tcsh startup fle
source ~astrodat/setup/setup-modules.sh
source ~astrodat/setup/setup-modules.csh
To see available packages, and those you have setup respectively
module avail
module list
Then you can setup packages such as a newer python by adding this to your startup script
module load esutil
module load ccfits
If you wanted to specify a particular version:
module load esutil/v0.5.1
module load ccfits/2.3
Note we are moving to modules from a previous system, so we don't have much software
installed yet. Let us know if you need something installed.