teaching-phd-skills

Why this exists

This lab runs Linux servers alongside Windows workstations, and the jobs that matter — a ReEDS run, a large MILP, a parameter sweep — do not belong on your laptop. They outlive your battery, your commute, and the moment your machine decides to install an update.

It is also a hard prerequisite. The code standard presumes shell fluency rather than teaching it, and skills 05 and 08 both assume you already have it. A student who cannot move a file to a server is blocked on their first week in a way nobody diagnoses, because it looks like slowness rather than a missing skill.

External material

MIT Missing Semester, lectures 1 and 2 — the shell, and shell tooling. This is the best free treatment of the subject and it is genuinely short. It teaches the shell in general; it knows nothing about UTA’s cluster, which is the second half below.

Your cluster’s own documentation for the scheduler. Ask which one the lab uses before you start — the commands differ and guessing wastes an afternoon.

Governing part

None. NEW-MACHINE.md in the standard covers setting a machine up, which overlaps.

The mechanic

Locally, first. Navigate without a file browser. Pipe one command into another. Redirect output to a file. Find a string in a directory tree you did not write. These four cover most of what you will ever need.

Then a machine that is not yours. A lab server or UTA HPC:

1. ssh in.
2. Move a file both directions — up and back. Getting results off the machine is the half people forget, and it is the half that matters at 2am before a deadline.
3. Run something that survives you disconnecting. A scheduler submission, or tmux / screen. Then close your laptop, go away, come back, and collect the output.
4. Read the log it produced, including the part where it complains.

That third step is the point of the lesson. Everything else is convenience; that one is the difference between a job you can run and a job you can only babysit.

Deliverable

A terminal transcript — paste it, screenshots are not searchable — plus the output file you retrieved from the remote machine.

Competency check

• Local: navigation, a pipe, a redirect, and a recursive search, all shown
• ssh to a lab server or HPC node, shown
• A file moved to the remote machine and a result moved back
• A job that survived a disconnection, with evidence it did — the submission, then the output
• The log read, with one line quoted that you had to look up

Turning it in

This replaces your arithmetic entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WA assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.

• In the text box: what you ran remotely, and what broke the first time.
• You hand in: A pasted terminal transcript (not a screenshot — it must be searchable) plus the output file you pulled back off the remote machine

You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all five skills in M1 are done, submit the M1 — The Workbench assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.

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