VirtualRDC News @ Cornell » Software

Temporary SAS license for ia64 implemented

Lars Vilhuber — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:41:15 +0000

We are working on straightening out the licensing situation for the ia64 nodes. In the meantime, a temporary license has been applied, and will tidy us over until we get the 2009/2010 license fully implemented.

SAS Syntax file for Linux editor

Lars Vilhuber — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:08:11 +0000

Kate is a editor that is installed on most (KDE-based) Linux desktop environments (including our own login nodes at the VirtualRDC). Ian S. has kindly provided us with a syntax-highlighting file for SAS programs. It can be downloaded and installed from http://www.vrdc.cornell.edu/extras/RPMS/noarch/sas-kate-syntax-1.0-0.noarch.rpm, although we might move it to our openSUSE BuildService at a later stage (to support other architectures). We actively use this file on our SUSE-based systems, including (soon) on NSF01.

SAS license updated

Lars Vilhuber — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:44:02 +0000

SAS licenses have been updated on the x86_64 nodes. As happens almost every year, the ia64 nodes have some problems. We hope to have a new license file by Wednesday.

OpenOffice upgraded to 3.0.1

Lars Vilhuber — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:46:16 +0000

At the request of some users, we have upgraded OpenOffice on the login node to the latest stable version from the repositories.

SVN tools on VirtualRDC nodes

Lars Vilhuber — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:13:21 +0000

Apart from the standard subversion command line clients (installed on all VirtualRDC nodes), the main login node VRDC6402 also sports two graphical interfaces:

KDESVN – this is integrated into the native Konqueror browser. You can view any versioned folder in a SVN-view, and perform SVN operations using Konqueror menus (top and right-click).
SmartSVN – this is a free (but not open-source) Java-based SVN client that also runs on Windows and Mac OS X. You can call it from the start menu.

Let us know if you find this useful, or if you run into any problems.

SAS 9.2 made default on x86_64 compute nodes

Lars Vilhuber — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:22:09 +0000

SAS 9.2 has been installed, and testing showed no issues. It has now been made the default installation. When the current SAS 9.1.3 license expires, only SAS 9.2 will be available. Note that SAS 9.2 is now a 64-bit application on non-Itanium Linux (VRDC6401 and VRDC6403 are Itanium, VRDC6402 and VRDC6405 are x86_64), in contrast to the 32-bit only SAS 9.1.3 on the x86_64 platform. This means that you can now leverage the large memory on those nodes, but also that you will NOT be able to use any pre-existing 9.1.3 format libraries or indexes – you will need to rebuild those.

SAS 9.1.3 can still be called by specifying the version explicitly (’sas91′ or ’sas913′). The standard call ’SAS’ now defaults to 9.2.

Please let us know if you find any issues.

Upcoming R maintenance on VRDC6401 (ia64)

Lars Vilhuber — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:45:40 +0000

We are going to put VRDC6401 into build-mode soon (within the next two weeks). Build-mode means that R will not be usable during that time period. Use at your own risk, but do move to VRDC6402-6405 if using R. Contact virtualrdc@cornell.edu if you do not have an account on those nodes.

GIS software and R interface installed

Lars Vilhuber — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:37:00 +0000

We’ve installed GRASS, QGIS, and the relevant R interface spgrass6 as well as related packages, on x86_64 nodes. If you use this software, please let us know about success and/or failure. We have not installed the full CRAN Task View “Analysis of Spatial Data“, but let us know if you need anything else.

R packages updated

Lars Vilhuber — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:29:01 +0000

All installed R packages have been updated to the latest version as of 2009-03-20.

R updated, JAGS installed on x86_64 nodes

Lars Vilhuber — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:28:25 +0000

We’ve updated R packages on the x86_64 nodes, and installed JAGS. Let us know if you encounter any problems. You can download the openSUSE 11.0 packages for JAGS from our openSUSE repository at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cornell_vrdc/openSUSE_11.0/.