This lesson is still being designed and assembled (Pre-Alpha version)

Introduction to High Performance Computing for astronomical software development: Setup

You will need the following software installed and working correctly on your system to be able to follow the course.

Common Issues & Tips

If you are having issues installing or running some of the tools below, check a list of common issues other course participants encountered and some useful tips for using the tools and working through the material.

Command Line Tool

You will need a command line tool (shell/console) in order to run Python scripts and connect to Bura. For the purposes of this course, Windows command line tool cmd provides sufficient functionality. On macOS and Linux, you will already have a command line tool available on your system. You can use a command line tool such as Bash, or any other command line tool that has similar syntax to Bash, since none of the content of this course is specific to Bash. Note that starting with macOS Catalina, Macs will use Zsh (Z shell) as the default command line tool instead of Bash.

To test your command line tool, start it up and type:

$ date

If your command line program is working - it should return the current date and time similar to:

Wed 21 Apr 2021 11:38:19 BST

Bura HPC setup

While many of the code examples in this course can be executed on a local PC, the parts related to the Slurm workload manager require having access to an HPC facility. The registered participants of this course received an email with instructions on how to connect to the Croatian in-kind contribution HPC called Bura. If you encountered problems while following these instructions, please contact the organizers of the workshop.