HPC Prerequisites
William & Mary's HPC clusters run on a mixture of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivative CentOS, so you will need basic Unix/Linux knowledge to use the university's HPC systems. If you are unfamiliar with the Unix/Linux command-line, please avail yourself of one or more of the following resources:
- Unix—the Bare Minimum
- UNIX / Linux Tutorial for Beginners
- Writing tcsh shell scripts
- The Linux command line for beginners (Ubuntu focused)
W&M users also have access to many relevant technical e-books through Swem Library, including Unix Power Tools (also available in print), Learning the Unix Operating System (also available in print), Using csh & tcsh, Linux Pocket Guide: Essential Commands, and Unix in a Nutshell.
Text editors
As part of your command-line proficiency, you will want to be familiar with some kind of "plain text" editor. Every W&M HPC login server has at least vim, nano, and emacs, of which nano is the easiest for a beginner (but ultimately least powerful). Alternatively, some users prefer to do their editing on their desktop or laptop computers (with the text editor or IDE of their choice), and then use a file transfer utility such as FileZilla, PuTTY, WinSCP, Fetch, rsync, or sftp to copy files to and from the clusters.
