CSE 125 Computing Environment

The computing environment for CSE 125 has a lot of moving parts. This page describes the parts and a strategy for making best use of them.

Where do I put my files?

When you are working on the lab machines, there are three places where you can directly access and store your files via a file system:

• C:\Workarea and C:\Workspace: These are local directories on the machine on which you are working. Since they are on the local drive of the lab machine, this option has the best performance for compiling, linking, and debugging. But, you need to make sure that you explicitly checkin any changes you make to files in these directories. After you logout of the lab machine, anyone can access these directories. And, although they persist after a reboot, they are reset when a new image gets installed on the machine (which can happen without any warning). so if you use these directories, you should treat them as volatile: the best practice is to do a checkout when you login and and checkin just before you logout of the machine (and peridoically if you are there for many hours).

• H: drive: This remote directory is the directory for your UCSD student account (not course specific). Typically this directory is limited to about 250MB of disk space. Using this directory will work early in the quarter, but you'll likely run out of space as the quarter progresses. See the next bullet below.

• cs125s share: Every student in the course also has a CSE 125 course-specific remote directory typically accessible via the following Windows share:

  \\acsnfs4.ucsd.edu\unix_home\linux\ieng6\cs125s\user
  

  There is also a Windows link to it under the following path:

  C:\ClassResources\cs125s storage directory ...
  

  This directory should have a large amount of available space (3GB). If you keep your working directory in a remote share, use this location instead of your student account (H: drive) since it has a much larger capacity.

  A more convenient way to use this directory is to mount it under a drive letter (some programs need this, e.g., when using a git shell). You can map the share path above to a drive letter using the following steps:

  Start -> Computer -> Map network drive (in menu bar)
  

There are also a few places where you access and store files over the network:

• source repo (svn, git, etc.): You will maintain the files that you create in some kind of version control system like subversion or git. If you have very large files that are not going to change (e.g., a very large library), you likely want to put those in your cs125s network share instead so that you don't have to download them everytime you do a checkout.

• cse125.ucsd.edu: This server holds the web pages and svn repos (if you decide to use svn) for each group. The home directories for your accounts on these machines are on a file server with TBs of capacity, so storage is not a problem. But, you'll need to use ssh/scp/sftp to copy data back and forth from the server to the lab machines or your personal machine.

How should I get my work done?

Given all of the places where your data can live, here is one suggested approach for organizing your data and getting your work done:

Source repo: Store your source code, config files, models, etc., in your source repository. Perhaps store the header files and binaries of libraries (as long as they are not too large). You want to keep your source repo reasonably sized because you will be checking it out many times over the quarter.

cs125s share: Place large files (large images, textures, compiled libraries, etc.) in the cs125s network drive. These are files that will not change often (or at all) and are too large to store in the source repo.

Lab machine: When you come to the lab to work and login to a machine, you have a couple of options. One is to do a checkout from your repo to a local directory on the machine (e.g., under C:\Workarea) and do all of your compiling and debugging there. This will have the best performance since you'll be working with files on the local drive. Note, though, that you need to commit any modifications back to the repo before you leave.

Another option is to do a checkout to the cs125s network share. Files there will persist across logins, reboots, and new images on the lab machines. But, performance is worse because all file data has to be read and written over the network while you are working.

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