Rafael A. Irizarry
The department has various types of computers:
These are all conceter via the school's network.
We are about to upgrade to a new computing system. In general things wont change much (expet we will have much more powerful computers). Our current set-up is the following:
THe new computing system will also have a separate machine for running SAS jobs.
It is okay to login to and run jobs on athena as long as you are careful when running CPU and memory intensive jobs. This includes in particular, R and Splus background jobs. You can run as many jobs as you want as long as you nice them at 19 (this means they get the lowest low priority. We will get to this later). At nice 10 (medium priority) try to run only one job at a time. When there are 7 or more medium priority jobs already on athena then it is especially important that you run at most on job. Any job taking more than 15 minutes needs to be a medium or low priority.
Similar rules apply to biopile although we are still figuring this out. For an account on biopile contact Jerry Gilyeat (ggilyeat@jhsph.edu).
The webserver should not be used to run CPU intensive jobs and you should not need to login to it.
To obtain access to the faculty workstations contact them directly.
Note: When the new computer system comes along we will encourage you to run computationally heavy jobs only on the cluster or computing server.
By default unix/linux doesn't have a windows system. These are the graphics, buttons, icons, etc... you typically see on a computer. However, in practice all unix systems run X windows and some window manager. Athena runs X and a really terrible desktop/window manager called CDE. Gnome and KDE are much better alternative and come in the standard linux isntallation. A really old window manager (fvwm) comes with cygwin.
Unix desktops are useful but most of the powerful tools are run from the command line and don't rely on X.
So the first thing you want to do when you start using a system with desktop environment is open a terminal emulator. This will give you a command line.
When you use ssh you will automatically be on a terminal emulator.
cd, ls, pwd, cp, rm, mkdir, rmdir.
man ls
/ is the lowest directory. Everything is on /. To go
there type cd /
cd you will go to your home
directory.
cd ~. The tilde means ``home''. To go
to my home dir type cd ~ririzarr
ls, you see al directories and files in your
system.
cd dirname.
pwd. Your full path will be /users/student/loginname.
You can always jump to another directory by typing the
full path: cd /users/faculty/ririzarr
mkdir to make directories
chmod ogr filename+
and for a directory
chmod ogrx filename+
chmod -w filename
less /bin/ls. However other executables you can see,
less /users/faculty/ririzarr/solaris-bin/mydvipdf.
You can easily make a program and run it. For example use this simple script to install a local version of R:
After downloading the source create a file called installR-1.9.1 with
the following content:
tar -xvzf R-1.9.1.tgz cd R-1.9.1 ./configure --prefix=/users/faculty/ririzarr/R-1.9.1 make make install
I run this by typing ./installR-1.9.1 in my \~ririzarr/src
directory. Here is an example of a command that will run R in batch
mode:
/usr/bin/nice 19 R --no-save BATCH $1.R -o a.out &
You can also use
/usr/bin/nice -n 19 R --no-save < $1.R \&> a.out &
Important: The & at the end runs this job on the background. It
is useful to learn the commands: fg, bg, kill, top to
manipulate what is running in the background and foreground. It is
also important to learn about standard output and standard error. The
& and > in front of a.out says ``send error messages and output to
the file a.out''. & is std error and > is for output. The default is
to screen.
Important: The nice in front of a command says to unix to let other jobs have priority over this one. This is important because the people using the system interactively should not be affected by a job that you are willing to wait hours for. In tsch you type
nice +19. You can also renice using
top
The shell is a program that runs on pretty much all unix/linux machines by default. It is hard to distinguish between what is unix and what is the shell, and you don't necessarily need to know the difference. All shells are similar and the important stuff is in all of them. But, you need to be aware that there are different shells.
My favorite is bash. Currently, this is not the default on athena. So if
you want bash you need to ask Jiong to change it.
* Matches any string of characters including the null string.
? Matches any single character.
[...] Matches any one of the characters enclosed. A pair
of characters
separated by a minus will match any character lexically between the
pair.
For example, [a-z]*
matches all names in the current directory beginning with one of the
letters a through z.
.bashrc file.
To define ``new commands'' use the aliases. See
~kbroman/.bashrc for an example.
ls on your prompt, the shell knows it's a command so
it needs to find the file to run it. There are many predefined places
but the pwd is not one them. If you want to run an executable on your
pwd you need to type ./filename.
However you can change the places to look by changing your PATH
environment. We recommend having a directory called bin in you
home dir where you store executables you create (for example your own
copy of R). To change the path in tcsh you can use:
setenv PATH /users/faculty/ririzarr/bin:/usr/dt/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin :/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/openwin/bin:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/sp arc-sun-solaris2.8:/usr/local/office52/program:/usr/local/vni/bin:/usr/local/xg obi/src:/usr/local/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/ucb:/opt/SUNWdtpcv/bin:/export/home/mtaylo r/postgresql/bin
PATH=/users/faculty/ririzarr/bin:/usr/dt/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin :/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/openwin/bin:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/sp arc-sun-solaris2.8:/usr/local/office52/program:/usr/local/vni/bin:/usr/local/xg obi/src:/usr/local/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/ucb:/opt/SUNWdtpcv/bin:/export/home/mtaylo r/postgresql/bin
Once you do this your unix will look for programs in your bin directory.
For others see:
http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~kbroman/unix_tools/
MacOS X and Linux come with ssh and X windows so you can open X windows from home without any effort. With a fast connection it will seem as if you were at work.
For Microsoft windows you need to download and install ssh (there are two openSSH and commerical ssh, both free). If you want X capabilites you need another program. cygwin comes with a free version of X for msft windows. There are other products that are nicer but cost money.
http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~loginname. All you need to do is
create an index.html file in the directory public_html
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2002 (1.62)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999,
Ross Moore,
Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 0 unix.tex
The translation was initiated by Rafael A. Irizarry on 2004-09-02