1  Introduction

The FRB-CESAB server Rossinante is dedicated to medium performance scientific computing (see Table 1.1 for hardware specification). It runs under the Operating System (OS) Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).

When do you need to use Rossinante?

• You need to analyse large datasets (RAM operations), and/or,
• You need to repeat tasks many times (parallelization on CPU/GPU).

Table 1.1: Hardware specifications

Hardware	Specifications
CPU	80 threads (2 x Intel Xeon Gold 5218R)
RAM	384 GB (12 x Cells 32 Go RDIMM)
GPU	NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000
Internal storage	6 TB (8 x 960 GB SSD SATA)
External storage (Seagate)	8 TB (1 x 8 To HDD USB 3.0 5900 tr/min)
External storage (Cervantes)	8 TB (1 x 8 To HDD USB 3.0 5900 tr/min)
External storage (Sancho)	8 TB (1 x 8 To HDD USB 3.0 5900 tr/min)

You can run programs implemented in R, Python, Julia, Shell script, C, C++, etc. directly from a terminal or using Web clients like RStudio Server or Jupyter Notebook.

Important

No job scheduling system (e.g. SLURM, Torque) has been installed. This means that you can launch jobs whenever you want. However you are invited to read Chapter 3 (Good practices).

What are the available software?

• R (latest version)
• RStudio Server
• Python (latest version)
• pip3 and Conda – Python packages managers
• Jupyter Notebook
• Julia
• LaTeX3
• Pandoc
• Quarto
• git
• Docker

And some useful utilities:

• CUDA – Deep Learning
• FFmpeg – Transcoding multimedia files
• ImageMagick – Image manipulation program
• Poppler – PDF utility library
• GDAL, GEOS, PROJ – Spatial libraries
• htop and btop – CPU, RAM, and processes monitoring tool
• nvtop – NVIDIA GPU monitoring tool
• nano and vim – CLI text editors
• screen and tmux – Terminal multiplexers
• tree – Recursive directory listing program
• curl and wget – Download managers
• zip and unzip – ZIP files managers

Can you do everything you want on Rossinante?

No!

Rossinante has only one administrator. Regular user, like you, has limited permissions.

For instance, you have only access to a personal directory: /home/you/. If you ask you can also have a personal space in one or more external drives (e.g. /media/cervantes/you).

If you need to use a non-installed software, please contact the administrator. Note that each user has a personal R library in which he/she can install every R packages he/she wants (independently of other users). For Python, packages are shared among all users (except if you work with virtual environments [recommended]).

Important

Rossinante is not a storage server. Its limited storage is shared among all users. You can store large dataset to run yours analyses, but once you’ve finished, please remove these files.