Welcome, students!
See also
Primary information is at Aalto’s IT Services for Students page, which focuses on basic services. This focuses on students in computing and data intensive programs.
Welcome to the Aalto! We are glad you are interested in scientific computing and data. scicomp.aalto.fi may be useful to you, but is somewhat targeted to research usage. However, it can still serve as a good introduction to resources for scientific and data-intensive computing at Aalto if you are a student. This page is devoted to resources which are available to students.
If you are involved in a research group or doing researcher for a professor/group leader, you are a researcher! You should acquaint yourself with all information on this site, starting with Welcome, researchers! and use whatever you need.
General IT instructions can be found at https://www.aalto.fi/en/it-help. There used to be some on into.aalto.fi, but these are gone now. There also used to be a 2-page PDF introduction for students, but it also seems to be gone from online. IT Services for Students is now the best introduction.
Accounts
In general, your Aalto account is identical to that which researchers have — the only difference is that you don’t have an departmental affiliation.
Getting help
As a student, the ITS servicedesks are the first place to go for help. The site https://www.aalto.fi/en/it-help is the new central site for IT instructions.
This site, https://scicomp.aalto.fi, is intended for research scientific computing support but has a few page useful to you.
Computation
As a student, you have access to various light computational resources which are suitable for most courses that need extra power:
Linux workstations, GPUs, software via modules |
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Other computer labs |
workstations, different OSs |
via ssh, software via modules, overcrowded. Brute and Force are for computation, others not. |
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basic software, in web browser |
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Windows and Linux |
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Own computers |
Software at https://download.aalto.fi |
The Jupyter service at https://jupyter.cs.aalto.fi is available to everyone with an Aalto account. It provides at least basic Python and R software; we try to keep it up to date with the things people need most for courses that use programming or data.
The shell servers
brute and force are for light computing, and generally for
students. You may find them useful, but can often be
overloaded. Light computing shell servers. Learn
how to launch Jupyter notebook on there.
For GPU computing, the Paniikki Linux computer lab (map) has GPUs in all
workstations. Software is available via module spider $name to
search and module load $name to load (and the module anaconda
has Python, tensorflow, etc.). Read the Paniikki cheatsheet
here. The instructions for Aalto
workstations sort of apply there as well. The
software on these machines is managed by the Aalto-IT team. This is
the place if you need to play with GPUs, deep learning, etc, and helps
you transition to serious computing on large clusters.
A new (2018) remote desktop service is available at https://vdi.aalto.fi (instructions). This provides Windows and Linux desktops and is designed to replace the need for computer classrooms with special software installed. You can access it via a web browser or the VMware Horizon client. More VDI Windows workstations are also available at http://mfavdi.aalto.fi/ .
The use of Triton is for research purposes and students can’t get access unless you are affiliated with a research project or (in very rare cases), a course makes special arrangements.
Data storage
Aalto home directories have a 100GB quota, and this is suitable for small use. Note that files here are lost once you leave Aalto, so make sure you back up.
The IT Services for Research page contains some other cloud services which may be useful for data storage. Of the cloud services, note that everyone at Aalto can get an unlimted Google Drive account through the Aalto Google Apps service: instructions. Your Aalto Google account will expire once you are no longer affiliated, so your files here will become inaccessible.
Software
ITS has a software and licenses (FI) page, and also a full list of licenses. There is also http://download.aalto.fi/. Various scientific software can be found for your own use via the Aalto software portals.
The Lmod (module) system provides more software on
brute/force and in Paniikki. For example, to access a bunch
of scientific Python software, you can do module load anaconda.
The researcher-focused instructions are here, but like many things on this site you may have
to adapt to the student systems.
Common software:
Python |
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Tensorflow etc packages |
same as Python, in Paniikki |
Other notes
It can be hard to find your way around Aalto, the official campus maps and directions are known for being confusing confusing. Try UsefulAaltoMap instead.
Do you have suggestions for this page? Please leave on issue on Github (make sure you have a good title that mentions the audience is students, so we can put the information in the right place). Better yet, send a pull request to us yourself.