CSAR Bulletin issued in March 2004

File Permissions

It has recently come to our attention that some users have files or directories that are world writeable. Some such files have been deleted (accidentally) by users not owning the files. CSAR advise that you do not set write permission on any file or directory (bear in mind that directory permissions override the permissions set on files within a directory) for anyone other than yourself. Should you have a need to share data with others then you can set the read permission for the group or world as appropriate. If you require any advice on setting permissions please contact the helpdesk.

/hold on the SAN and deprecation of XCP

Please note that /hold is now located on the SAN and is visible to all the origins and newton. As a result note that xcp will be deprecated shortly and we advise that users now use cp. xcp will become an alias to cp -D which will be a faster copy method for all file locations on the SAN, i.e. your home directory, the hold directory and your santmp directory.

If you feel this does not fit your needs please discuss with CSAR.

SCSL v1.5.1 on Newton

We have recently installed the latest version of the SCSL libraries on Newton. At present this is a beta release product but it has the very important feature that it is compatible with version 8 of the Intel compiler.

This product is available by loading the scsl-1.5.1.0beta module on Newton, if there are any problems with this then please contact the CSAR helpdesk.

Intel Compilers Version 8

The default version of the Intel compilers is currently version 7.1, and we would like to remind users that we have a more recent version (version 8.0) that is available which provides greater benefits to codes.

MPT 1.9

We also have more updated versions of MPT (communications libraries, MPI and SHMEM support) on all our machines. These can provide increased performance for your applications. Some key new features for CSAR users include being able to use MPI in Fortran instead of an include mpif.h, process spawning and related functions now work across partitions, improved barrier and fence algorithms and C++ bindings for the version 8.0 compiler.