Recommended software for CS 5220

Aug 3, 2015 • David Bindel

Most of the class work will be done on the Xeon Phi cluster, but it is likely that you will also want to do some development work on your own machine. You will at the minimum need

  • A good text editor (or GUI if you prefer)
  • An ssh client

You may also want a C/C++ development environment. For this reason, I strongly recommend that you install the following software on your machine (depending on OS).

Shell and git setup

Over the course of the class, you will be doing a variety of tasks at a Unix shell. This is the way you do anything at all on the class cluster, but in order to get the most leverage from learning these tools, I recommend making sure you know how to access a similar shell on your own machine. How to get such a shell depends on your OS.

Windows

  • If you are running under Windows, I recommend installing Cygwin. Make sure you install the Git packages from the “Devel” category.
  • If you want to do any local development, I recommend also installing GCC (from under the “Devel” category).
  • You may also want to download a Git GUI such as GitHub for Windows. Even if you do, I still recommend installing Cygwin for the Unix-style shell.

OS X

  • OS X is Unix under the hood (a BSD variant). If you don’t usually use the Terminal program, you’ll likely want to fish it out now. The default terminal is pretty good, but iTerm2 is a popular alternative if you want something fancier.

  • If you’ll develop locally, you probably want XCode (from the App Store) and the command line tools. To install the command line tools, open a terminal and type

    xcode-select --install

    Then select the command line tools.

  • You will likely want some additional utilities; I recommend installing HomeBrew to make these easy to get, but MacPorts is a good alternative.
  • You may want a Git GUI such as GitHub for Mac. Or you may be happy with the default command line git.

Linux

  • If you’re already running Linux, there’s not so much to do. Just make sure you have git installed (and ideally a compiler).

Setting up git

For the rest of this document, I will assume that you are at a Unix-style shell (a Cygwin shell, OS X Terminal, or ordinary terminal under Linux). You will probably want to start by setting up your Git configuration to match your GitHub account. For example, I would write

git config --global user.name "dbindel"
git config --global user.email "bindel@cs.cornell.edu"
git config --global push.default simple

Note that there’s no requirement that you set up GitHub to use your real name and email (nor indeed is there any strict requirement that you set these configuration options at all!).

Setting up Python

If you already have Python set up and are happy with it, great! If you don’t have a preferred Python environment already, I recommend Anaconda. Note that this will probably be convenient later in the class, but is again not required.