The 'Les Houches' center does not offer permanent facilities for computational exercises. To provide the necessary infrastructure, Emmanuel Quémener sets up every year a virtual machine environment that can be installed on the participants laptops (plus a few we can provide ourselves).
He provides a Debian distribution containing a large number of scientific open-source codes. The special version for the school contains all required codes for the exercise sessions. Examples of employed codes from previous years range from open source production codes such as Lammps, ABinit, Siesta, Quantum Expresso, Gromacs, VMD, ... to development tools as C and Fortran compiler, Python Numpy/Scipy environments.
The system is launched using a VirtualBox virtual machine software. This has the advantage, that all participants dispose of identical computing environments which are completely independent of the type and installation of the employed computers and whose use does not interfere with the computers' ordinary operations. Emmanuel proposes two distributions:
- A static stand-alone version, which requires 8GB of hard drive on the students' computers.
- A SIDUS distribution, which can be booted from the network. SIDUS requires no disk space, but a wire connection during use. Changes to this distribution are automatically transmitted to all computers booting the new version.
So, please bring your own laptop!
