ARC Short Courses - May 2002

ARC offers non-credit (no grades) short courses on ARC computing services to all members of the Rensselaer community. Members of the ARC staff who can most effectively help you accomplish your computing goals teach these courses.

There is no charge for these courses, but you must register. Course registration is now done on-line. Before you register, make sure you have the necessary prerequisites for the course. They are listed along with the course descriptions below.

If you have any questions, you can contact the VCC Help Desk at extension 7777 or send e-mail to consult@rpi.edu.

Registration Information
Schedule of Courses and Course Descriptions

Registration Information

On-line Registration will begin on May 1.

IF YOU WILL NOT ATTEND: If you change your mind about taking a class for which you have registered, or if you will not be able to attend, please CANCEL by sending e-mail to arc-courses@rpi.edu. This will allow someone else to take your spot.

IF THE CLASS IS FULL, OR IF YOU ARE ON A WAITING LIST: If you cannot register for a class you want to take, please continue checking the On-line Registration page to see if a spot opens up due to a cancellation. Most cancellations occur during the last 24 hours before the class. If you do not get into the class you wanted, watch for the next occurrence of the course to be announced or contact the instructor to get the handouts or to arrange for individual instruction.

RCS userID: If you don't already have one, before class, you must pick up your RCS userID which is available only to members of the Rensselaer community (students, faculty, or staff). This userID enables you to use any of the several hundred networked PCs and workstations on campus, connect to RCS from a networked PC, dial-in remotely, and print your work. To obtain your userID, bring your Rensselaer I.D. card to the Help Desk in the VCC.

Courses

Date	Course	Time	Place
Monday, May 13	Introduction to UNIX	2 - 4 pm	JEC 3207
Tuesday, May 14	Introduction to emacs	10 am - noon	JEC 3207
Tuesday, May 14	Introduction to vi	2 - 4 pm	JEC 3207
Wednesday, May 15	Getting Started with LaTeX	10 am - noon	VCC North
Wednesday, May 15	Parallel Programming with MPI	2 - 4 pm	JEC 3207

Course Descriptions

Introduction to UNIX

This course provides an introduction to the UNIX operating system. It is taught on RCS, but most of the material also applies to Linux.

It introduces several common UNIX commands, some of which have to do with managing and printing files. You will also learn about output redirection, pipes, filename wildcards, and writing bash functions. Finally, the course will explain the directory structure and path names, including some commands for manipulating directories and for controlling directory permissions.

Brief exercises are interspersed between topics for hands-on practice.

This course provides a basis for other short courses, including emacs and vi.

Text Editors: A text editor is used to create, edit, store, retrieve, and view files. You might need a text editor when you are writing a program or a paper or editing a mail message. There are several text editors on RCS including nedit, emacs, and vi. Which one you use if up to you -- or you could use all three at different times. ACS offers courses on emacs and vi. (nedit is so simple that no instruction is needed; however, unlike vi and emacs, it cannot be used remotely.)
Introduction to Vi
This course introduces the vi text editor, a file editor available on all UNIX systems. On RCS UNIX workstations, vi is a full-screen editor. Vi starts up quickly and has adequate functionality for many text editing tasks, such as composing source code and mail messages. There are no menus; you use keystrokes to enter commands.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with RCS and UNIX
Introduction to Emacs
This course introduces the emacs text editor, a standard file editor on RCS and many other UNIX systems. On RCS UNIX workstations, emacs provides a graphical interface with menus. Emacs is slower to start up, but has more functionality than vi, including special features to simplify writing source code in several programming languages, including C and TeX/LaTeX.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with RCS and UNIX

Parallel Programming with MPI
This course introduces parallel processing using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) subroutine library. The course assumes previous programming experience in Fortran or C (the example and exercise used in the course are written in Fortran), but no prior experience in using message passing parallelism. It is intended primarily for people who currently use -- or plan to use -- our Linux cluster for numerically-intensive computing projects.

Prerequisites: Previous programming experience in Fortran or C and familiarity with UNIX and a text editor on RCS

Getting Started with LaTeX
If you are writing a thesis, a book, an article for a technical journal, or just a long document containing a lot of equations, a bibliography, figures and tables, or cross references, consider using LaTeX.
LaTeX is a document preparation system based on the TeX language, which was designed especially for formatting mathematical and scientific text. LaTeX is not a WYSIWYG program like Word; rather it uses text markup that looks similar to HTML. Although you may consider this a disadvantage, consider that LaTeX handles long, complex documents with ease, does not crash, never corrupts your files, is not susceptible to viruses, is available for just about any computer platform, and produces output of the highest quality (particularly equations).
And, if you are writing a thesis, there is a local "thesis" template that meets the requirements of the Rensselaer Graduate School.
LaTeX is used world-wide on PCs, Macs, Unix, and Linux. Because the language is the same on all platforms, what you learn will apply on whatever comput ing system you use. This short course can only get you started, but the foundation should enable you to continue building your knowledge of LaTeX.

Handouts:

If you are unable to attend a course, you can contact the instructor who can provide you with handouts from the course. Alternatively, for emacs and LaTeX, you can click on the links in the left-hand column below to gain access to the course materials.

Course	Instructor
Introduction to UNIX	Mike Kupferschmid
Introduction to vi	Mike Kupferschmid
Introduction to emacs	Harriet Borton
Parallel Programming with MPI	Mike Kupferschmid
Getting Started with LaTeX	Harriet Borton

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