Complete this before Monday March 23

To prepare for remote class for the rest of the semester, you will need to set up some software on your home system and also learn and try out a few things this week.

Goals:

  • Set up your home system to get ready for remote class

  • Learn the vim editor that you can use when ssh’ed into cs or XSEDE systems (plus you should just know vim as a good, always available, text editor).

  • Practice with ssh and scp.

  • Set up a zoom meeting for your reading group, and try a practice meeting.

Complete the following tasks:

1. Set up vpn

If you are not on campus, then set up vpn on your home system so that you can access the college’s digital library subscriptions and any private web content. Follow these instructions: VPN setup and running steps. You do not always need to run vpn, but if you want to access digital library contents and anything else that is private to the Swarthmore network, you need to use it.

You can test out if it was successful by trying to access pdf versions of papers from the ACM and IEEE digital library using Swarthmore’s subscription (you should be able to download pdf versions of papers without entering a user name or password). Here are two examples to test it out: one from IEEE, another from ACM (this started as a CS87 project!)

2. Learn vim

The vi (and vim) editor is available on every Unix system. It is a very efficient, lightweight, text editor that is easy to use after learning a few basic commands, which that you can learn by running though the vimtutor tutorial.

When you log into XSEDE resources, atom is not available to you, so you will need to use vi (vim) to edit files.

Vi (vim) also has a lot of advanced features that are very nice, and there are gui versions of vim, like other editors, for when you run on an X window system (like when you are logged into our machines).

  1. ssh into our system and run vimtutor ( more info on remote access, and more info on ssh):

    from home$  ssh <yourusername>@lab.cs.swarthmore.edu

cs$  cd ~/cs87
cs$  pwd
cs$  vimtutor           # start the vim tutorial

  2. Go through the sections listed below of vimtutor (the other sections cover more obscure features that are not necessary). It will take about 30 minutes to run through these lessons.

    • all of Lesson 1 (moving around, x, i, A, :wq)

    • Lesson 2.6 (dd)

    • Lesson 2.7 (undo)

    • Lesson 3.1 (p) and 3.2 (r)

    • Lesson 4.1 (G) and 4.2 (searching)

    • Lesson 6.2 (a), 6.3 ( R ), and 6.4 (y and p)

3. Practice using scp, ssh, vim on comet

For your XSEDE odd-even sort experiments, you will need to scp your oddeven.c, and oddeven.sb files from your repo on our systemn to Comet. You can scp each file one by one or make a tar file containing all files you want to copy over, and just scp the single tar file. (more info on scp, more info on tar)

on_cs$ pwd       # get path to your Lab 4 repo
on_cs$ ssh you@commet.sdsc.edu

comet$ mkdir cs87
comet$ cd cs87
comet$ mkdir oddeven
comet$ cd oddeven
comet$ scp you_on_cs@cs.swarthmore.edu:<path to your Lab 4 repo>/oddeven.c .
# example:
       scp newhall@cs.swarthmore.edu:./cs87/labs/Lab04-tia/oddeven.c .

comet$ scp you_on_cs@cs.swarthmore.edu:<path to your Lab 4 repo>/oddeven.sb .

On Comet, I have a Makefile you can copy to compile oddevensort on comet, and then try submitting an oddevensort job to the default queue by running sbatch with the slurm script you copied over: submit to the run queue:

comet$ cp ~newhall/Makefile .
comet$ make
comet$ sbatch oddeven.sb

On Comet, you will need to edit the oddeven.sb slurm file using vi (and create additional .sb files) to submit to sbatch:

comet$ vim oddeven.sb   # change something like number of nodes
comet$ sbatch oddeven.sb

4. Practice using Zoom

There are instructions for using zoom off this page: remote resources. Additionally on Friday, all students should receive an eamil from the college about zoom and other on-line resources.

Set-up and try out a zoom meeting with your reading group members:

  1. one of you should create a zoom meeting for your reading group:

    • Name the meeting something like CS87ReadingGroupX where X is your group’s reading group number reading groups

    • Make it a Recurring meeting with the Recurrence→No Fixed Time option.

    • Enable join before host in the Meeting options

    • Save and send your reading group members the zoom link (Join URL associated with your meeting or copy the invitation link)

  2. contact each other to find a time for a 10 minute practice zoom meeting.

  3. at the time you arranged to meet, join your zoom meeting (because "join before host" is selected any of you can start the meeting).

5. Handy Resources