Scientific Computing

It can be convenient to open a file by launching the default program without first leaving the Terminal. For simplicity, we assume the file is named “file.txt” but it can be any file openable by a program on the computer. This technique works with any file type that has an associated default program on the computer.

• macOS: open file.txt
• Linux: xdg-open file.txt
• Windows: start file.txt

Recommended: rather than using Rsync, it is more convenient to give the remote host read-only Git access via:

• per-repo (cannot share between repos) SSH Deploy Keys
• (all repos you authorize) Oauth tokens for HTTPS clone.

Rsync over SSH allows one to edit and update code without putting credentials on the remote host.

Laptop to remote host:

rsync -r -t -v -z --exclude={build/,.git/} ~/myProg login@host:myProg

--exclude={build/,.git/}

Exclude syncing of Git information and build/ directory, which wastes time and may fail

-z --compress

compress data for transfer

-r --recursive

recursively sync directories

-t --times

preserve modification times

-v --verbose

verbose output

Git filters may clash with the CMake ExternalProject update step. The “download” step invokes checkout and the “update” step may stash and invoke the Git filters, causing the build to fail.

There is not a straightforward way to turn off CMake Git filters.

Solution: Git pre-commit hook instead of Git filters. Users with Git filters need to disable the filters in ~/.gitconfig and preferably change the filters to pre-commit hooks if possible.

Things that did not work

For reference, these did not help override Git filters.

ExternalProject_Add(...
GIT_REMOTE_UPDATE_STRATEGY  "CHECKOUT"
UPDATE_COMMAND ""
)

ExternalProject_Add_Step(MyProj gitOverride
DEPENDERS update
COMMAND git -C <SOURCE_DIR> config --local filter.strip-notebook-output.clean cat
COMMAND git -C <SOURCE_DIR> config --local --list
COMMENT "CMake ExternalProject: override git config to strip notebook output"
LOG true
INDEPENDENT true
)

Jupyter notebook outputs can be large (plots, images, etc.), making Git repo history excessively large and making Git operations slower as the Git history grows. Jupyter notebook outputs can reveal personal information with regard to usernames, Python executable, directory layout, and data outputs.

Strip all Jupyter outputs from Git tracking with a client-side Git pre-commit hook. We use Git pre-commit hook because Git filters can interfere with other programs such as CMake ExternalProject.

Tell Git user-wide where to find Git hooks:

git config --global core.hooksPath ~/.git/hooks

Edit the file ~/.git/hooks/pre-commit to contain:

The procps watch command allows running a command repeatedly on a Unix-like system such as Linux and macOS. Typically the command is a very quick shell command watching temperature, file status, etc. An alternative in general is a small standalone C program watch.

On macOS “watch” is available via Homebrew. Most Linux distributions have “watch” available by default.

HPC batch systems generally track resources used by users and batch jobs to help ensure fair use of system resources, even if the user isn’t actually charged money for specific job usage. The qacct command allows querying batch accounting logs by job number or username, etc.

For example

qacct -d 7 -o $(whoami) -j

Gives the last 7 days of jobs. “ru_wallclock” is the number of seconds it took to run the job.

accounting log format

The system temporary directory has long been used as a scratch pad in examples. Over time, security limitations (virus scanners) and performance issues (abrupt clearing of system temporary directory) have lead major programs to use user temporary or cache directories instead of the system temporary directory.

The XDG Base Directory specification is a standard for the user cache directory. For systems not implementing the environment variable “XDG_CACHE_HOME”, typical defaults for user cache directory are:

• Windows %LOCALAPPDATA%
• macOS ${HOME}/Library/Caches
• Linux ${HOME}/.cache

To allow a for loop to make an arbitrary number of overlaid plots in a single axes, we may wish to endlessly cycle colors using itertools. This technique only makes sense up to a few dozen cycles depending on the Matplotlib color palette but it can be better than just ending a loop after the palette is exhausted.

import itertools

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.colors as mplcolors

color_cycle = itertools.cycle(mplcolors.TABLEAU_COLORS)

xy = [(x, x**1.2) for x in range(20)]
# toy data

ax = plt.figure().gca()

for (x, y), color in zip(xy, color_cycle):
    ax.scatter(x, y, color=color)

print(xy)

plt.show()

If an external program needs a subdirectory to create and load multiple files, Python tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() creates a temporary working directory. shutil.copytree is used to recursively copy all files if the call to the external program succeeds.

from pathlib import Path
import tempfile
import subprocess
import shutil
import uuid

file = Path(f"~/{uuid.uuid4().hex}.txt").expanduser()
# toy file
file.write_text("Hello World!")

with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory(ignore_cleanup_errors=True) as f:
    shutil.copy(file, f)
    subprocess.check_call(["cat", Path(f) / file.name])

    new_dir = file.parent / f"{file.stem}"
    print(f"\n{file}  Solved, copy to {new_dir}")
    shutil.copytree(f, new_dir)

Public Git repo clone via HTTPS and push via SSH is fast and generally effective for security. For private Git repos, we suggest Git cloning via SSH to avoid the need for HTTPS credentials. SSH Agent avoids the need to constantly type the SSH password.

Git clone with Git over SSH by simply replacing “https://” in the Git repo URL with “ssh://”. Be sure to remove the trailing “.git” from the URL if present. For example:

git clone ssh://github.invalid/username/private-repo-name