This practical session is intended to make sure everyone is set up correctly, rather than introducing cluster and grid concepts.
You can work individually or in small groups of 2 or 3. Form yourselves into those groups now.
Run putty from here: itnet.uj.ac.za/putty
Everyone who is going to log into the cluster needs to acquire a user account and password from Ben, on a piece of paper. Do not just make up account names and numbers.
Now attempt to connect to osg-ui.grid.uj.ac.za and check
that you get a unix shell prompt.
You should be able to run a hello world test like this:
[benc@osg-ui ~]$ echo hello world
hello world
If the above works, then your shell access to the cluster seems to be working.
Next check that you can downlaod images from the cluster webserver into your web browser. This is so that you can see the results of some of the later practical exercises.
Copy an example image that I have in my home directory into your web page directory:
$mkdir public_html$cp ~benc/puppy.jpeg public_html/
Then pointing your web browser at a URL like
http://http://152.106.18.254/~YOURUSERNAME/ replacing
YOURUSERNAME with the same user name that you used to log into the cluster.
You should see a file listing, for now containing a single entry,
puppy.jpeg that you copied above. Click and that and you
should see a picture of a beautiful puppy that I met once in Auckland Park.
In later exercises, we will use cluster and grid computing to make computer generated images - the above browser-based method is how we will view them.