Using CSD3 for LSST:UK work

See: LSST:UK Confluence for more detail

Request access through DiRAC SAFE

You can request access to the LSST:UK project (ip005) on CSD3 through DiRAC SAFE. Login is through SSH, and requires an SSH key and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Once setup, login via:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/<private key> <user>@login.hpc.cam.ac.uk

and enter your MFA Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) from your authentication device (normally your smartphone).

Refer to CSD3 Docs for more information.

Once logged onto CSD3 for the first time, it is useful to add some environment variables that have been setup to make LSST Pipeline activation easier:

cat $HOME/rds/rds-iris-ip005/lsst_env >> $HOME/.bashrc
exec $SHELL

Activate LSST Pipeline conda environment

Following this you’ll have environment variables for the shared storage space ($RDS) and for the latest versions and weekly builds of the LSST Pipeline ($v_latest and $w_latest, respectively). Note: this will be the latest version available on CSD3, not necessarily the latest version published by Rubin. Notes for admins to update the latest versions, see ADMIN.md.

To activate the LSST Pipeline, use:

source $v_latest

or

source $w_latest

Setup lsst_distrib

With the conda environment activated, run the following:

setup lsst_distrib

Additional packages

All installations also includes the LSST:UK obs_vista package, which is automatically setup by the setup lsst_distrib command, above.

Other LSST Pipeline versions

To see which versions these point to, you can do ls -l $RDS/lsst_stack, for example:

[<user>@login-q-1 lsst_stack]$ ls -l $RDS/lsst_stack
total 28
-rwxrwx---+ 1 <user> rds-iris-ip005 13033 Jun 28 13:48 lsstinstall
drwxrwx---+ 3 <user> iris-ip005      4096 Jun 28 13:27 v26_0_0
drwxrwx---+ 3 <user> iris-ip005      4096 Jun 28 14:16 v27_0_0
lrwxrwxrwx  1 <user> iris-ip005         7 Jul  1 09:34 v_latest -> v27_0_0
drwxrwx---+ 3 <user> iris-ip005      4096 Jun 28 14:03 w_2024_26
lrwxrwxrwx  1 <user> iris-ip005         9 Jun 28 13:27 w_latest -> w_2024_26

which shows $v_latest is v27_0_0 and $w_latest is w_2024_26.

To activate a version other than the latest, use the path to its loadLSST.sh file, for example:

source $RDS/lsst_stack/v26_0_0/loadLSST.sh

will activate v26_0_0.

To find out about LSST Pipeline versions and weekly and daily builds, see lsstinstall-other-tags.