How to put a collection of scripts on lnif-cluster

This howto explains how to install a collection of standalone commands and scripts on lnif-cluster, a system equipped with ROCKS cluster distribution. The collection of commands here is generically named sw-scripts.

1. Prepare the environment:
   On the front-end node, copy your distribution of scripts to the /share/apps directory. This directory will be automatically mounted on single nodes as a sort of reference storage.
    
2. Prepare the nodes:
   You should then copy the software from /share/apps directory to single nodes by invoking:
   rocks run host compute ‘cp -R /share/apps/sw-scripts /opt
   By using this command you are telling rocks system to run the command line string specified in quotes on all compute-* nodes.
    
3. Configure nodes environment variables:
   

   Potentially, this step is not mandatory, because your software is already present on the compute nodes. However, chances are that you want to include the executable directories in the PATH environment variable, in order to run them in a handy way.

   1. Prepare a script called sw-scripts.sh which includes all the operations related to the software you want to run at node startup. E.g.:
      export PATH=$PATH:/opt/sw-scripts
   2. Put this script into /etc/profile.d/
      cp sw-scripts.sh /etc/profile.d
   3. You should now include the script you just create in a special list of files to be processed during node startup. The list is located within the file: /var/411/Files.mk
      Append to that file the following line:
      FILES += /etc/profile.d/sw-scripts-sh
   4. Re - build the directory including the file you have just modified:
      make -C /var/411
   5. Update the nodes, invoking 411get command as we did before:
      rocks run host compute command=”411get --all”