1  Overview

1.1 Introduction

The FRB-CESAB server Rossinante is dedicated to scientific computing (see Table 1.1 for hardware specification). It runs under the GNU/Linux distribution Debian 12 (Bookworm).

When do you want 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, Shell script, C, C++, etc. directly from a terminal, using Web clients like RStudio Server or inside Docker containers.

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 respect some rules (Chapter 3).

1.2 Storage

As a regular user, you have access to four personal directories:

  • /home/you/
  • /media/sancho/you/ (external drive)
  • /media/seagate/you/ (external drive)
  • /media/cervantes/you/ (external drive)

Inside these directories, you can create, edit, rename and remove any files/directories you want.

Important

Rossinante is not a storage server. The 30 TB storage are shared among all users. You can store large datasets to run yours analyses, but once you’re done, please remove these files.

There is no backup system! You are responsible for your own data.

1.3 Available software

  • R – Scientific computing (among others)
  • RStudio Server – Web interface for R
  • Python 3 – Scientific computing (among others)
  • pip3 – Python packages managers
  • venv – Python virtual environments
  • Pandoc – Universal document converter
  • Quarto – Scientific publishing system
  • git – Version control system
  • make – Project compilation
  • Docker – Containerization

1.4 Useful utilities

  • FFmpeg – Transcoding multimedia files
  • ImageMagick – Image manipulation program
  • Poppler – PDF utility library
  • ExifTool – File metadata utility
  • GDAL, GEOS, PROJ – Spatial libraries
  • htop – CPU, RAM, and processes monitoring tool
  • ctop – Docker containers monitoring tool
  • nano, Vim and Neovim – CLI text editors
  • screen and tmux – Terminal multiplexers
  • tree – Recursive directory listing program
  • curl and wget – Download managers
  • rsync – Incremental file transfer
  • zip and unzip – ZIP files managers
  • zsh – Unix shell (alternative to Bash)
  • lazygit – CLI interface for git

1.5 Missing software

If you need to use a non-installed software, please contact the administrator.

Note on R packages

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).

:::