Documentation

Environment

Created by Unknown User (bjsmith), last modified on 2023-02-13

The Derecho HPC system uses a Linux operating system and, for scheduling jobs, Altair PBS Professional (PBS Pro). The system supports widely used shells on its login and compute nodes. Users also have several compiler choices. See Compiling code on NCAR systems for those details.

Operating system: Cray Linux Environment / SUSE Linux.

Scheduler: See Starting and managing jobs with PBS for documentation about scheduling jobs.

Shells: The default login shell for new Derecho users is bash. To change your default to tcsh or other available shell, use the Systems Accounting Manager (SAM). It may take several hours for a change to take effect. You can confirm which shell is set as your default by entering the following on your command line:

echo $SHELL

Page contents


Logging in

To log in, start your terminal or Secure Shell client and run an ssh command as shown here:
ssh -X username@system_name.ucar.edu 
OR 
ssh -X username@system_name.hpc.ucar.edu

Some users (particularly on Macs) need to use -Y instead of -X when calling SSH to enable X11 forwarding.

You can use this shorter command if your username for the system is the same as your username on your local computer:

ssh -X system_name.ucar.edu 
OR 
ssh -X system_system_name.hpc.ucar.edu

After running the ssh command, you will be asked to authenticate to finish logging in.


Environment modules

CISL provides an extensive set of environment modules to manage the Derecho system's environment variables, compilers, libraries, and other software. You can use some modules regardless of which compiler is loaded, while others are compiler-dependent.

See Environment modules for information about essential commands and how to set up and save customized environments for your work.