MSI Setup

Important

Prior to executing these steps you should have:

Completed the ln-sierra-tutorials-hpc-local-setup guide.
Read through ln-sierra-usage.
Gotten CORRECT results on some small scale experiments of interest on your local machine.

You really, really, really, don’t want to be trying to do development/debugging on MSI.

Workflow

Get an MSI account (you will need to talk to Maria Gini, my advisor), and verify that you can login to mesabi via the following commands, run from your laptop on a UMN computer/UMN wifi (will not work from outside UMN campus without a VPN):
```
ssh <x500>@mesabi.umn.edu
```
Where <x500> is your umn x500. If the commands are successful, you have logged into a mesabi login node (this is different than a mesabi compute node).

A similar check for mangi via the following commands, run from your laptop on a UMN computer/UMN wifi (will not work from outside UMN campus without a VPN):
```
ssh <x500>@mangi.umn.edu
```
If the commands are successful, you have logged into a mangi login node (this is different than a mangi compute node).
Once you can login, you can begin the setup by sourcing the environment definitions:
```
. /home/gini/shared/swarm/bin/msi-env-setup.sh
```
Important

ANYTIME you log into an MSI node (login or compute) to build/run ANYTHING you MUST source this script otherwise things might not work. This includes if you ran the script on a login node and then started an interactive session via job submission with -p interactive (the environment is NOT inherited).
On an MSI login node (can be any type, as the filesystem is shared across all clusters), install the same python dependencies as in ln-usage, but user local (you obviously don’t have admin priveleges on the cluster):
```
pip3 install --user -r requirements/msi.txt
```
This is a one time step. Must be done on a login node, as compute nodes do not always have internet access (apparently?).
On an MSI login node, get an interactive job session so you can build your selected project and its dependencies natively to the cluster you will be running on (mangi/mesabi) for maximum speed:
```
srun -N 1 --ntasks-per-node=4  --mem-per-cpu=1gb -t 1:00:00 -p interactive --pty bash
```
The above command, when it returns, will give you 1 hour of time on an actual compute node. You know you are running/building on a compute node rather than a login node on mangi/mesabi when the hostname is cnXXXX rather than lnXXXX.
In your interactive session clone the bootstrap repo and follow the instructions on the bootstrap README:
```
git clone https://github.com/swarm-robotics/bootstrap.git
```
In general, the only argument you should need for the script is --msi.