MCSR Parallel-O-Gram

The University has renewed the campus MATLAB license. All users of the MATLAB campus license will need to reactivate your MATLAB installation to use the new license unless you installed after April 1st, 2012.

To reactivate your current Windows or Mac OS X installation: start MATLAB, then choose Help->Licensing->Update Current Licenses. Choose “License 585993: Total Academic Headcount Campus – TAH Designated Computer”. Click OK a series of times. Restart MATLAB for the changes to take effect.

Instructions for reactivating network and lab installations can be found on the MATLAB page on myOleMiss.

If you have any questions about MATLAB reactivation, please contact MCSR at assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu or 915-3036.

If you’ve been using MATLAB under the University of Mississippi’s Total Academic Headcount license (ie, if you obtained MATLAB by following the instructions in the MyOleMiss portal), you’ve likely been seeing a warning that the current license will expire at the end of March. While technically true, this is a bit misleading, and there is no cause for concern. The license does formally expire each March 31st. However, it then enters a 30-day grace period; the software will work, unrenewed, until April 30th. A renewal purchase is in progress and will be complete next week, well in advance of this cutoff date. Thus, the warnings about the license expiring at the end of March can simply be ignored.

MCSR has scheduled the following workshops for this semester:

Introduction to UNIX – Part 1, Thursday, February 9th, 3pm, Weir 107
Introduction to UNIX – Part 2, Thursday, February 16th, 3pm, Weir 107
Programming in Python for Beginners, Thursday, March 1st, 3pm, Weir 107
Version Control with Subversion, Wednesday, March 7th, 3pm, Weir 107
Introduction to MPI and PBS, Thursday, March 22nd, 3pm, Weir 107
Introduction to LaTeX, Thursday, March 29th, 3pm, Weir 107
Scientific Computing in Python, Wednesday, April 4th, 3pm, Weir 107
Introduction to R, Thursday, April 12th, 3pm, Weir 107

Go to olemiss.edu/workshop to view or register for any of these workshops. Training is free, as always.

If you have questions, or would like to suggest a workshop topic, please email us at assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu.

Redwood, MCSR’s SGI Altix 3700 supercomputer, is down today. We will inform you when the problem has been identified and solved and the system is available for use.

While adding nodes yesterday, we were forced to regenerate RSA keys for sequoia (both the head node and all of its compute nodes). If you’ve been getting error messages like this:

IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
8c:fe:12:eb:7a:c6:41:bf:b7:b9:
f1:67:ad:69:06:0d.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /home/r1260/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending key in /home/r1260/.ssh/known_hosts:2
RSA host key for sequoia has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

this is simply a symptom of the new key generation. You are not being hacked; there is no man-in-the-middle attack in progress.

To correct the problem, we’ve run a script that automatically deleted everyone’s known_hosts file. Thus, from this point forward you will not see the above error message, but probably will see a message like this:

The authenticity of host ‘sequoia (130.74.110.18)’ can’t be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 8c:fe:12:eb:7a:c6:41:bf:b7:b9:f1:67:ad:69:06:0d.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Just type yes (the whole word) at the prompt and connect as normal. This will only come up once; once you’ve accepted the new key all subsequent connections will happen normally.

Because we deleted the whole known_hosts file, you will need to type ‘yes’ when connecting to redwood for the first time after today as well.

Please contact MCSR staff at assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu with any questions.

Sequoia, MCSR’s Altix XE Infiniband cluster, will be unreachable tomorrow as we add compute nodes. We expect to return the cluster to production by midday Thursday.

As of this October 17th, MCSR has a new High Performance Computing Specialist, Ben Pharr. Ben holds BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from Ole Miss, and is currently working on his PhD. He has taught several classes in the Computer Science department as a graduate instructor. He has been using Linux and UNIX for over a decade, and is fluent in many programming languages. Ben comes to us from Global Technical Systems, a small defense contractor, were he led a small software team writing software for airborne radar. Prior to that Ben served as Network Administrator in the Computer Science department here at Ole Miss.

A systems engineer from TheMathWorks, the company that publishes MATLAB, will be on campus on Wednesday, 5 Oct 11 to host a seminar on Image and Video Processing with MATLAB. This is a technical presentation on the features and use of the program, not a sales talk; the University already has a comprehensive site license for MATLAB.

All faculty, staff, and students are invited to attend. Pre-registration is encouraged, but walk-ins (including those who can only make it for part of the morning) are welcome as well.

For more information or to register, go here. If you have problems with the registration or questions about the event more generally, you can contact MathWorks directly or email assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu.

MCSR has scheduled these training workshops for October:

Image Processing with MATLAB*, Wednesday, 5 Oct 11, 9AM, Union 404
Intro to Mathematica: Tuesday, 11 Oct 11, 3:00PM, Weir 107
UNIX Shell Scripting: Thursday, 13 Oct 11, 3:00PM, Weir 107
Text Processing with Sed, Tuesday, 18 Oct 11, 2:00PM, Weir 107
Text Processing with Awk, Thursday, 20 Oct 11, 3:00PM , Weir 107
Intro to Perl: Tuesday, 25 Oct 11, 2:00PM, Weir 107
Intro to MPI: Thursday, 27 Oct 1, 2:00PM, Weir 107

*The MATLAB workshop will be taught by a systems engineer from TheMathWorks (the company that publishes MATLAB). For more information, click here.

Go to http://www.olemiss.edu/workshop to view or register for any of these workshops. Training is free, as always.

Keep an eye on this space for more workshops to be scheduled soon. As always, email MCSR staff at assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu with any questions or to request a particular workshop topic or time.

MATLAB 2011b was released on September 1st. This upgrade is free to all students, faculty and staff at UM. For individual users (both students and faculty), the instructions and activation key are unchanged and remain available in the portal. Lab administrators will need a new File Installation Key for the new version; this, too, is available in the myOleMiss portal. You can also get it by emailing MCSR at assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu.

In addition to the new version, the Mapping toolbox has been added to the UM campus license (but not the student license), courtesy of the Mississippi Mineral Resources Institute. All new downloads/installations of MATLAB will automatically include the Mapping Toolbox. Older (before September 2011) installs will not include the Mapping Toolbox, but researchers who are interested in using this toolbox can obtain it free from themathworks.com.

Contact MCSR staff at x5683 or assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu with any questions about MATLAB.