Using Linux Compute Resources

Compute Resources

1. College Wide
   1. riptide - graduate students only
   2. whirlpool - undergraduate students only
2. Department level
   1. AAE
   2. ABE - danpatch
   3. CE - moonbase
   4. EE - ececomp, eceprog, ece-batch
   5. IE - barany
   6. ME - americano, bolt, caffeine, coffeeexpress, galileo, nut, tfm, pin, rivet, slot, tab, widget

Network Connection

You will need to be connected to the Purdue network in some way.

If you are on campus, you are mostly liked using a wired connection or wireless.

If you are off campus, you will need to connect to the Purdue VPN before establishing an SSH connection. 

SSH

If you are on a Linux host ssh is typically available.

For Windows hosts, you can use SecureCRT or PuTTY.

Linux/Unix/Shell

Once you are logged into a host you will be in a Linux environment.

Screen/tmux

If you have long-running jobs, the screen or tmux command is very useful.

1. In a screen session, it behaves like a normal shell session, but you can "detach" from it. Leave it running. Log out. Then come back to it later

2. Starting a screen session is as simple as running the screen command

3. If it's the first time running the screen, it will give some very brief intro text

4. If you want to leave the session running, and whatever might be running "inside" that session, you will need to "detach" from it by entering ctrl-a then ctrl-d.

5. You should get a message above your prompt about being detached.

6. Now you can log out of an ssh session and it won't hang waiting for a process or job to finish.

7. When you log back into that host, you can "re-attach" to that session with the command: screen -R

8. If you want to run more than 1 screen session, or might have started more than 1 you can list all screen sessions you have with the command screen -ls

9. You can give your sessions a more meaningful name with the -S flag: screen -S job_20190610

10. After you've detached from it and want to re-attach, you can specify it: screen -R job_20190610

11. tmux is very similar to screen but has some differences that make it a bit more powerful than screen.

X Windows

Some applications will require a GUI to run. For example, to do pre- or post-processing for Abaqus, you will need to bring up a GUI to create the model, mesh it, and prepare it before you run your solve/simulation.

To do this remotely, you will need to have an X server running on your local host.

If you are using Linux, it should already be running.

Max OSX needs a little configuration sometimes.

With Windows, you will need to do a bit more.

In your ssh client, you will want to have "X11 forwarding" enabled. If you are starting ssh from a command line/terminal application, be sure to use the -X flag, which enables X11 forwarding.

Specific Applications

1. Abaqus

2. Ansys

3. Matlab

Other Resources

1. University of Surrey, UNIX Tutorial for Beginners