We have just made the transition of most of the servers from CentOS6 or CentOS7 to CentOS8. Most everything should be unified on CentOS8 (unless you know what you are doing). 

This brings several new changes (as always) and some added benefits. This is a summary and does not reflect all the changes.

To check your servers operating system version, use this command:

cat /etc/redhat-release

Software Installs

The biggest changes should allow you to install software by yourself! There are two different ways you can install easily install software if either are supported by whatever you are trying to install.

Please note, that if you do not want to do either of these, it is fine. Just let me know and I am happy to install software for you (and everyone else) to use.

Conda

A lot of bioinformatics software is now available via conda. It is installed globally, but you can not install packages globally. You can create your own environment and then use that. 

The first time you use conda, you will need to create a local environment. Start with:

source /usr/local/anaconda3/bin/activate
conda create --name <username>

But use your username instead of <username>!

After this has run, any time you need to use conda, you can use the command

conda activate <username>

And you will get into your environment. 

A simple test is to install my fastq-pair package and see if it works:

conda install -c bioconda fastq-pair

once it has installed, this command should give some output

fastq-pair

Docker

Another popular way of sharing software is by using docker. We don’t support docker, but we support a drop-in replacement called podman.

Anywhere you see docker, you can use podman instead. For example, we created a focus docker image for the cami challenge described here: https://hub.docker.com/r/linsalrob/cami-focus and you can install that with

podman pull linsalrob/cami-focus

pip

If you are trying to run some python code and don’t have the appropriate library, you should be able to use pip install as a user to add it. For example:

pip3 install --user xmlschema

this will install the appropriate libraries into your account. Of course, if you want them globally installed, just let me know.

Deprecated software and alternatives

Deprecated	Alternate	Used For	Alternative
screen	tmux	Virtual terminals. You should use this!	tmux has similar keys to screen but uses ctrl-b instead of ctrl-a to access them. eg. create a new window: “ctrl-b n”
cd-hit	mmseqs	Clustering sequences	cd-hit is still an option if you want, but mmseqs2 appears to be much better

We use anvi’o for all sorts of ‘omics analysis, but it is a pain to run on your laptop as you can’t watch netflix and youtube, check facebook, and post to twitter at the same time (well, you can, but why would you?).

Instead, we have the latest version of anvi’o installed on tatabox, one of the machines in our HPC environment. After you have run all the anvi-commands, very often you want to launch anvi-interactive, but tatabox is safely behind a firewall. 

We can make a two step connection to tatabox using port tunneling. Depending on how you do this, you will need three terminals open.

First, start anvi-interactive on tatabox, and keep that window open (or use screen or tmux which are much better alternatives).

Next, open a terminal on your computer, and use this command. Change XXXX to a port near the on that you ssh to on edwards-data, change YYYY to the port that you normally use, and change USERNAME to your USERNAME.

ssh -L 5555:localhost:XXXX -N -p YYYY USERNAME@edwards-data.sdsu.edu

Next, open another terminal (or if you are using screen or tmux, open a new terminal emulator), and login to edwards-data.sdsu.edu using your normal account (the USERNAME from above).

On edwards-data, run this command:

 ssh -L XXXX:localhost:8080 -N USERNAME@tatabox

Finally, on your laptop, you should open a new browser window and paste this URL:

http://localhost:5555/

You should see the anvi-interactive interface appear, and you can get to work.

For several years NSF ran a trial where they would ask for a conflicts form in excel-type format. Recently, that has been codified into the Collaborators and Other Affiliations Information form. You can find more information about that form at the NSF Website and the NSF GPG.

We developed a simple script to help complete this form for you. It does not do all the work, but it gets you a long way there, and you can do the rest a lot easier. After all, you have a lot of other things to worry about when you are writing that grant. Read more to see how to use it.

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