Linux Hints for SCHISM 

Using Linux from Windows 

You will need tools to:

connect to the Linux server that serves as a gateway, sometimes called a server or on clusters or supercomputers often called the head node.

for graphical applications with windows like browsers and some text editors, you may need something called “XWindow Emulation”.

A method to copy files back and forth fast, usually with a secure (ssh) method

often you will want to set up an efficient text editor (Visual Studio Code) and VisIT both of which adopt a client-server approach to viewing or working on things in Windows that are located on Linux (the server)

Basic connection 

The simplest tools is PutTy, which can also handle passwordless login using rsa tokens. MobaXTerm is an all-in-one tool that can also handle this task (??).

Copying between Windows and Linux is best done using WinSCP, which piggybacks on Putty. Two side benefits of WinSCP is that you can use your windows-side text editor on Linux-side files just by clicking, though this is only going to work well if the file is a managable size. The copies are faster than other tools and the filter options are very efficient at narrowing down what you are looking at in a directory with hundreds of fi. Two particularly convenient filters are these:

XWindow Emulation 

You can do this with MobaXTerm, Xming, vcxsrv. These tools provide an engine to emulate graphics. These are free products. There may be commercial alternatives such as Hummingbird Exceed. XWindows can be slow with some remote servers or connections, and that may not be something your emulation software can speed up. For text editing this is the reason a lot of us use VS Code, which uses a client-server approach where the graphics are actually done locally on windows.

All-in-one: MobaXTerm 

MobaXTerm provides an all-in-one approach to the above tasks, but note that it is markedly inferior at some of them. In particular, it is orders of magnitude slower copying files because it uses a slower protocol and it lacks good filtering so you have to wait for it to scan directories with thousands of files. As with WinSCP, it can open a file for editing using local Windows editors, but since the copying is slower the restrictions will be a bit more severe. Anyhow, it is an interesting option and does basic terminal work and connections well.

Copying a Run Safely 

Do NOT use the linux copy command ‘cp’ to copy a run. A considerable amount of information, particularly symbolic links, will be lost. Instead use rsync:

Basic command: rsync -avz /path/to/original_sim/ /path_to_dest/ - The trailing slash on original_sim/ is important. There are many explanations online: search ‘rsync trailing slash’. - Symbolic links will be preserved. - If you want to move rather than copy, use –remove-source-files - Usually, you will want to void copying heavy outputs with `–exclude option. You can stack them. Examples are:
- –exclude=’outputs*’ omits any directory starting with outputs, in which case you will have to create a new one.
- –exclude=’outputs.tropic*’ omits an extra alternative directory, which you may have created and moved to a new name.
- –exclude=’outputs/*.nc’ leaves staout_1 through staout_9 and flux.out, needed for restarting using ihot=2.
- –exclude=’outputs/nonfatal*’ omits the nonfatal error messsages, which can be big but will be overwritten by new runs.
Change the name of the run in launch.pbs files to something short and informative.
Change the contact email in launch.pbs.
At this point if the prior simulation was runable the new one should be.

Special Case: Remote Computer Using RSA Keys 

We run into this case a lot when copying data from, say, an Azure virtual cluster in a situation where password authentication is not used.

rsync -e ‘ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa_name’ -avz myname@10.7.240.8:/shared/home/myname/simulations/sim_name/ local_sim_name/ –exclude=’outputs.tropic*’ –exclude=’outputs/*.nc’

Symbolic links 

In Linux (and more rarely in Windows) a symbolic link is something that looks like a file and acts like a file but is actually a pointer or shutcut to another file or folder. So for instance SCHISM may require a file for inflow boundaries called flux.th and you may prefer to work with a versioned name flux_alt2.th. To make this work you could make a symbolic link that points to the file:

$ ln -s flux_alt2.th flux.th

The -s just means symbolic. The next argument is the file/path and the last is the link name. Inside simulation directories we recommend very simple, local links. Don’t try to economize – it turns into a mess. The one exception is the sflux directory. This directory is for atmospheric inputs, and we almost always use a script (called make_links_full.py) to make symbolic links with the required name pointing to resources that are shared and that identify their source.

Archives and Tarballs 

Essential commands in a SCHISM context 

Countless Linux introductions are available online, including some excellent cheat sheets like this. Once you know the commands or vocabulary, it is easy to get more information. You will need cd, ls

cd some_dir: Go to the named directory, which may be relative or absolute. Consider pushd some_dir instead if you want to go somewhere temporarily such as to recompile, and then return (with popd)
df -h: List total disk use and availability (ie, is there room for a run?)
du -h | sort -n -s: List disk usage in human readable form starting at the point where launched and “pipe” the output to the sort command which lists the results from large to small (ie, how much room have I used here)
find . -name ‘hotstart_000???_*.nc’: Find files that match the pattern, with ? matching a single character. Numerous options to take action like deleting.
grep: Finds a word or phrase in the contents of files or a string. For instance, grep nday param*.nml will give you all the lines with nday in it in all the files matching the wildcard param*.nml (check the end day; use start_ to get the start year, month, day).
ls -al: This variant of the file listing command ls shows dates as welll as symbolic link targets relationships
pwd: Name of the current directory
scp: Another fast, secure copying tool based on ssh.
tail -n 15: Look at the last 15 lines of a file, default 10. Add -f to keep updating, for instance do this with outputs/mirror.out to check if run is chugging along.