Linux for Apocrita Workshop

On May 3, 2024 Queen Mary University of London conducted a workshop to introduce our students to Linux at the Department W building in Whitechapel. Students from a variety of programmes at Queen Mary attended the workshop. Many students who participated are working towards Masters and PhD degrees.

The Research Software Engineer, (RSE), Giles Greenway and I covered the following five topics: Generalities of Linux, navigating filesystem, managing files, text editors, and processing text.

Our theme for these workshops at the University is that together we can grow in our digital skills to achieve more efficient use of the cluster Apocrita at QMUL and form a great Digital community to improve research on all levels. With that in mind, our mascot to represent Apocrita is the bee and we enjoyed creating bee swag to encourage the idea of a busy hive, each bee contributing to the overall success of the hive.

I observed that most of the students seemed to prefer nano to vim to edit files. Giles and I tailored exercises for Linux on Apocrita. Some students were able to successfully complete the exercises more quickly than others and we were very pleased to see that they, in turn, helped the other students to finish their exercises.

A majority of students seemed to enjoy their learning experience and expressed an interest in continuing learning Linux on Apocrita.

We hope to see these students again next month at a Linux Intermediate Workshop.

Special thanks to the Doctoral College for your utmost support in our endeavour to promote our service for our research QMUL community.