Using ASU Computing Commons 102 (CPCOM 102) - ASU-CompMethodsPhysics-PHY494/PHY494-resources GitHub Wiki

Resources and notes for the ASU PHY 494 Computational Methods in Physics class, specific for ASU students.

To work on problems outside class hours, got to the ASU Tempe campus Computing Commons 102 (CPCOM 102) on Palm Walk between the ASU Bookstore and Physical Education Building West.

Use the iMacs near the back of the room. Boot the Mac OS X environment (use your ASURITE username and password). (The on-switch is at the back on the left hand side, just in case.)

Note that when you log out, your work will be gone so you must commit any changes to your repository or save to a flash drive or cloud storage.

Available software

The iMacs have

  • bash
  • git
  • editors (nano, vim, emacs, TextWrangler)

bash

Open Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities: The easiest way to do this is

  1. Select Finder icon from the menu bar at the bottom or click on the background (status bar should display Finder).
  2. Choose Menu Go → Utilities (or just hit shift + command + U (all at the same time)). The Utilities folder should open.
  3. Find Terminal and click. (You can drag it to your menu bar for easier access.)

git

In the terminal, type

git --version

and you should see something like

git version 2.3.2 (Apple Git-55)

Software to be installed

Every time you use one of the machines, you need to install the python software stack with Anaconda. Download takes a few minutes so you might want to put it on a flash drive.

Follow the instructions on installing Python with Anaconda. In short, download the Mac OS X installer for Python 3.5, 64 bit and run it. The following might "just work"; if not, you need to get the links from the Anaconda installer webpage:

curl https://3230d63b5fc54e62148e-c95ac804525aac4b6dba79b00b39d1d3.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/Anaconda3-2.5.0-MacOSX-x86_64.sh -O
bash Anaconda3-2.5.0-MacOSX-x86_64.sh

and answer all questions with yes.

After installation, open a new terminal session (to make the changes take effect; close the session in which you installed.)

Test that you can open a notebook:

jupyter notebook

Note that the first time you import matplotlib e.g. in the notebook

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

it can take about a minute for it to set up (it processes all the fonts). This is normal.