What's Available on Cosmos

• Facilities and Functionality
• Applications and Utilities

Diskspace

Each user with an account on Cosmos will have 50Mb of disk-space allocated for their personal files; this space is regularly backed up. In addition, users will have a separate, much larger quota for the /scratch directory on Cosmos which is designed for temporary storage of large files, for example the output data from a current or recently-run numerical job. Files in /scratch are subject to deletion a few days after creation, so this quota must not be used for permanent storage.

Login access

Users can access their account on Cosmos --- their files, all applications and indeed all of Cosmos' facilities --- from any computer which has access to the Internet by using SSH, with or without X Windows, in the usual way. (Access via Telnet is blocked as this is unsafe.)

File access

Files can be transferred between Cosmos and any computer which has Internet access by using SCP or SFTP in the usual way. (Access via plain FTP is blocked as this is unsafe.)

Email

Users can read and send email from their Cosmos account by starting a Web-browser on Cosmos (e.g., /usr/local/bin/mozilla) and accessing Webmail (webmail.umist.ac.uk) in the usual way.

The following email clients are also available:

• Pine, /usr/local/bin/pine;
• Mutt, /usr/local/bin/mutt;
• Elm /usr/local/bin/elm;
• Fetchmail /usr/local/bin/fetchmail.

(As of the time of writing, January 2004, Webmail is the UMIST-recommended way of reading email; other clients may become unavailable in the not-too-distant future.)

Computationally-Intensive Jobs

Long-Running Computational Jobs and Other Processes: NQS Batch System Cosmos and Eric are ideally-suited for long-running, computationally-intensive processes. At the time of writing (2004, January) both machines have the NQS batch/queue system installed:

1. Cosmos, which has 8 CPUs, has three queues: one_day, three_day and seven_day.
   
   
2. Eric, which has 30 CPUs and 30 Gb of RAM, has four queues: one_day, three_day, seven_day and vip. The latter queue is for users who are members of the three research groups which part funded Eric's purchase.

All long-running and/or computationally-intensive jobs must be run within the NQS batch/queue system. Such jobs which are not run within NQS may be killed without notice. Details of NQS usage are available in a separate document.

1. Long-running jobs which require a lot of RAM should be started on Eric.
   
   
2. Short computationally-intensive jobs will be tolerated on Cosmos itself, but users should limit themselves to running just one such process.

Compilers, Programming Languages and Libraries

A dedicated document is available from ISD to describe each of the following:

1. Sun Workshop compilers: Fortran 77 and F90/F95 (f77 and f90); C and C++ (cc and CC). Three versions are available:
   • 4.2 in /software/SUNWspro_4.2/bin/;
   • 5.0 in /software/SUNWspro/bin/;
   • 6.0 in /software/workshop6/utils/SUNWspro/bin.
   
   
2. GNU (Free Software Foundation) compilers: C/C++/Objective C and Fortran 77 (/usr/local/bin/gcc, g++ and g77).
   
   
3. NAg numerical analysis library for Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 (/usr/local/lib/libnag.a and libnagfl90.a).

The following are available on Cosmos "as is", with no support:

1. Perl scripting language (/usr/local/bin/perl).
2. Python scripting/RAD language (/usr/local/bin/python).

Editors

There are several editors and programming environments installed on Cosmos:

1. Vi (/usr/bin/vi) is, of course, available.
   
   
2. Both GNU Emacs and XEmacs (/usr/local/bin/emacs and /software/SUNWspro/bin/xemacs, respectively) are installed.
   
   
3. Pico (/usr/local/bin/pico), a small, simple, fast editor which runs in vt100/xterm/etc. terminals with on-screen menus/help --- more friendly than vi, less complicated than Emacs.
   
   
4. DTPad (/usr/dt/bin/dtpad), a simple graphical editor which comes with Solaris (the default editor under the Common Desktop Environment).
   
   
5. GEdit (/usr/local/bin/gedit), a simple graphical editor (the default editor in the GNU Gnome Environment). This is the recommended editor for most users.

"Productivity" Applications and Utilities

1. Antiword, /usr/local/bin/antiword, a great little gizmo for converting MS Word documents into formatted ASCII or Postscript.

Miscellaneous Applications

1. Acrobat: PDF document viewer (/usr/local/bin/acroread).
   
   
2. [La]TeX: document preparation system, can generated postscript or PDF (/software/teTeX_v1.0/bin/latex, tex, pdftex, pdflatex, xdvi, dvips and /usr/local/bin/gv, ggv).
   
   
3. Mozilla: gecko-based Web browser (cf. recent versions of Netscape, Galeon and Phoenix).

Scientific Applications

The following scientific applications are available:

1. Abaqus: advanced finite element analysis software suite (www.hks.com).
   
   
2. AVS Express, GSharp and Toolmaster (Uniras), respectively: advanced visualization system; a family of graphics tools for visual data analysis and presentation --- Toolmaster agX is an application-level cross-platform graphs library with C and Fortran language functions; graphing and contouring display tool --- point-and-click interface for building graphical displays combined with scripting capabilities. (www.avsuk.com).
   
   
3. CFX: computational fluid-dynamics software (www.software.aeat.com).
   
   
4. Gaussian: computational chemistry software --- designed to model molecular systems (www.gaussian.com)
   
   
5. Grace: is a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool.
   
   
6. Genstat: an interactive statistical system with a graphical user interface and graphical facilities.
   
   
7. Mathematica: mathematical software suite with computer-algebra, graphical, statistical and numerical facilities (www.wolfram.com).
   
   
8. Matlab: mathematical programming language and a technical computing environment (www.mathworks.com).
   
   
9. Patran: a software environment for performing 3D finite-element simulations (www.mscsoftware.com).
   
   
10. PSCAD: general-purpose time domain simulation tool for studying transient behavior of electrical networks (www.pscad.com).