CentOS Resources

CentOS Linux is the primary operating system used on desktop systems at Courant, and it is also used on the majority of the Institute's computational resources. If you are curious which release is currently installed you can simply run "cat /etc/*release" from a terminal. The links below provide information regarding a variety of issues that our users may have.

General Linux Support

Other References

The documentation below will be heavily influenced by the feedback that you, the users, send us about your experiences. If you have any questions at all (no question is stupid or insignificant!), please send them to helpdesk@cims.nyu.edu and let us know -- your question could very likely become a part of this documentation.

Why CentOS ?

From the official CentOS wiki:

CentOS Linux is a community-supported distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by Red Hat for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). As such, CentOS Linux aims to be functionally compatible with RHEL. The CentOS Project mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork. CentOS Linux is no-cost and free to redistribute.

Our choice of an "Enterprise Linux" distribution largely has to do with stability. The "Enterprise Linux" line of Linux distributions uses tried and true versions of software which will provide the most stable and consistent user experience.

Servers with CentOS

For a list of General Compute Servers and GPU Compute Servers running CentOS see the section on Compute Servers.

Please use these servers to test your code. Inform us of anything that doesn't work, software that is missing, etc. at helpdesk@cims.nyu.edu.

Topics

Desktop Support (TBD)
An overview of our graphical desktop environment for CentOS 7 (GNOME, GDM, etc.)

File System Overview
A brief look at what is located where on a typical CentOS 7 system

Mathematica
General information about our Mathematica installations

MATLAB
General information about our MATLAB installations

Module System
When using software built from source, modules can help prepare your shell environment by pre-configuring related paths, etc.

Python and Jupyter Notebook
Information about our Python installations, packages, and environment, including how to use them with Jupyter Notebook.

/scratch Partition
Information about the /scratch partition available on every CentOS 7 machine.

Shells
Information about shells (bash, csh, tcsh) and related source files (.bashrc, etc.)

Software
Information about the types of software that are available on CentOS 7 systems, how to request new software, etc.