sPHENIX discussion of software

[Martin Purschke <purschke AT bnl.gov>]

Dear sPHENIX Software aficionados,

last week at the SBU workfest and later at the simulations meeting, we
kicked the idea around that we would make a number of ready-made virtual
machines available that would allow anyone not set up on the RCF, or
without access to the sPHENIX environment within the RCF, to quickly run
sPHENIX simulations by running the VM.

You can look a Dave's and my presentation in the Indico page of the
simulation meeting,
https://indico.bnl.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1185

I had prepared a VM with all ingredients on board to run at least the
tutorials from the workfest (the VM has *everything* you'd need for a
full simulation effort). I had prepared the VM using VmWare, then cloned
this machine to a VirtualBox environment.

The VirtualBox-VM can be found in downloadable form at

https://www.phenix.bnl.gov/WWW/p/draft/purschke/geantvm/

Right now you'll find a geant4vm2.ova "export" file in the area. The
size is about 3.3G. If you have installed VirtualBox on your machine,
you can download and then import the geant4vm2.ova file and have the
same machine that I showcased at the Simulations meeting.

The machine starts in console mode since I don't want to mess with your
X11 environment without you in control.  You can either log in and
"startx", or become root and "telinit 5". Or you an permanently change
the default run level to 5 once you see that it works.

The user is "geant4user", pw geant4%user, same for root.

I will add the corresponding VmWare machine to the same area over the
weekend.

I'll update this list as progress is made - I will add recipes how to
update the existing VM to get the lastest builds etc over time.

The machine was initially made on my Mac. I just downloaded and imported
it in virtualbox on my Ubuntu Desktop in my office - works like a charm.

Please let me know if you run into trouble.

Best,
        Martin

-- 
Martin L. Purschke, Ph.D.        ;   purschke AT bnl.gov
                                 ;   http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/~purschke
                                 ;
Brookhaven National Laboratory   ;   phone: +1-631-344-5244
Physics Department Bldg 510 C    ;   fax:   +1-631-344-3253
Upton, NY 11973-5000             ;   skype: mpurschke
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