Interactive Environment and Processing

agave is an IBM Regatta p690 with 32 Power4 processors, 64 GB main memory, ~1TB disk space, running AIX 5.2. For more information about its architecture, please view the Architecture section of this user guide.

The default shell for agave is ksh. This shell is recommended for batch processing. You must NOT copy startup files from other systems to your home directory on agave.

The TMPDIR environment variable specifies a directory where temporary files should be placed. The default location for TMPDIR is /tmp1/$USER for interactive sessions. Applications which use the TMPDIR variable will place temporary files created during execution in the TMPDIR directory. It should be emphasized that the TMPDIR of an interactive session is completely different from the TMPDIR in a batch job. The latter exists only during a job's tenure in the system.

The interactive limit (CPU time) per login session on all systems is 20 minutes. Any violations of this limit will result in process termination. A user may only use a maximum of two processors simultaneously for interactive processing. A user is expected to lower this limit under heavy system loads. Exceptions to this policy will be considered by the staff on a per case basis. This limitation must be overcome by submitting the job in "batch mode" as described below.

You may view your login session limits with the ulimit -a command.

$ ulimit -a
time(seconds)        1200
file(blocks)         unlimited
data(kbytes)         1631072
stack(kbytes)        614400
memory(kbytes)       unlimited
coredump(blocks)     2097151
nofiles(descriptors) 2000

Information can be found for almost any command in the command's online manual (commonly referred to a man page) page. The following shows how to view the man page for the ls command.

agave% man ls

We provide the following files in your home directory upon account creation.