Notes for Users | Parasol Laboratory

Notes for Computer Science Users at Texas A&M University

The parasol lab is supported by one full-time administrator and a small group of parasol graduate students. Problems with any of the lab computers should be directed to parasol-support@cs.tamu.edu.

Important Things to Consider

Because parasol is run outside the supervision of the Computer Science's CSG and SSO, parasol.cs.tamu.edu does NOT share 'netgroup' information with other systems in the Computer Science Department. This has the following implications to the user:

first and foremost, please address all e-mail concerning the system to parasol-support@cs.tamu.edu.
there is no network printer in the CS department available to parasol.
common file/directory spaces (provided via NFS) available on other CS systems are not present on parasol. You must use sftp or scp to transfer files between systems.
changes to passwords on parasol and other CS systems are not reconciled. i.e., changing your CSG password will not change your parasol password and vice-versa.
mail addressed to user@parasol.cs.tamu.edu will never arrive there because the parasol subnet is not part of the CS domain for the purposes of mail. It is recommended that you place a .forward file to your CS (or other) account in your user directory on parasol to redirect e-mail that is generated on parasol to an account that you will read.

Services that do not encrypt password information (telnet, ftp, rlogin, etc.) have been disabled on parasol for security reasons. In order to access the machine you have to use the suite of SSH tools (ssh, scp, sftp, etc). There are a couple of good sets of SSH tools for Windows - puTTy and SSH (also were you can find SSH for Linux). PARASOL Lab machines currently run SSH 3.1, and that is what is recommended for home systems as well. When you configure SSH, make sure you use SSH 2 for the protocol and 3des as the encryption algorithm.

Notes on Programming

The best starting place to go is at HP's web site.
Remember that in order to have access to your files while parasol is in dedicated mode you should keep them somewhere besides /research/parasol. When parasol is not dedicated, /research/parasol is the best place to keep your code to get the best performance compiling and running on parasol.

In addition to parasol, there are a number of other machines in the PARASOL Lab that are useful.

sunburn is a 2-processor HP machine running the same OS as parasol with nearly identical software installed on it. The version of aCC installed is slightly older than parasol's, which will create some problems for STL programmers. But other than that, sunburn can be used for compiling and running small jobs when parasol is unavailable.
There are also several Linux/Windows PC's in the lab. While the PC's are in linux, they each have their own /research and /scratch directories for additional storage outside of parasol and sunburn. /scratch is not backed up and is the best place to store non-critical files. /research is backed up and is a good place to keep files you are working on using a PC. PC's recommended for use by ASCI developers are all on the fifth floor of HRBB. umbrella has KCC installed on it and can be used to compile codes before running on the other PC's.
There is also a 10-processor Linux cluster available. If you would like an account on it, please send email to timmie@cs.tamu.edu.
The webserver in the PARASOL lab is blackwidowers. This hosts the ASCI code documentation (updated periodically).
If you have any questions or problems regarding the machines in the PARASOL Lab, please email parasol-support@cs.tamu.edu.

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