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📦 Available software

A huge range of software applications, utilities, and libraries are installed and configured for you. Whether you need Rstudio or Spyder, Julia running in VSCode, popular R or Python packages, of fully configured Jupyter Notebooks, we have you covered.

The list of installed software is so large we make no effort to enumerate everything here, but you can always get an up-to-date list by opening a terminal on the Grid and running 

conda list

Start with the expectation that all the software you need is already installed and ready to use. If that expectation is ever broken please email research@hbs.edu.

The most recent version of our software environment is activated when you log in to the HBS Grid via NoMachine and nothing further is required unless you wish to use an environment other than the default.

When logging in via SSH from a terminal (i.e., without NoMachine) you must explicitly activate the environment you wish to use after logging in. The default environment can be activated by running 

ml rcs

Refer to the terminal environment documentation for details.

Installing Compatible Software on the HBSGrid

Ideally, the application you need will have a version compatible with the HBSGrid system (currently Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, also known as RHEL 7.) Examples include the PyCharm Python IDE and fzf command-line fuzzy-finder. If you have a compatible application, using the terminal, download and extract the program; run any installer provided (if there is no installer just move the program wherever you like); and run the software directly from the terminal. If the software is available in multiple versions, pick one that mentions "RHEL", "RPM", "Linux x86-64 / AMD64", or just "Linux".

As an illustration, we can install PyCharm as follows:

  1. Connect to the HBSGrid via NoMachine, start Terminal from the menu, and download Pycharm: 

wget https://download.jetbrains.com/python/pycharm-community-2020.1.3.tar.gz
2. You will notice that the file has a '.tar.gz' extension, indicating that it needs to be decompressed with 'tar': 
tar -xvf pycharm-community-2020.1.3.tar.gz
3. Submit an interactive job to run Pycharm on a compute node: 
bsub -I pycharm-community-2020.1.3/bin/pycharm.sh
If all goes well you will see the Pycharm splash screen and you can start a new Python project using this popular IDE.

If the application you need does not have a pre-built version compatible with the HBSGrid system or you are having issues installing your compatible software, reach out to research@hbs.edu.