mrc-ide resources setup

Welcome to the centre/department. This page is to orient you to some of the computing resources to get you started.

• A departmental Microsoft Teams workspace.
• Access to the departmental github organisation mrc-ide which gives free private repos with more flexible collaboration options than personal repositories use.
• Access to the cluster

Steps

1. If you do not have one, please create a github account by visiting https://github.com
2. Go to https://github.com/settings/emails and add your imperial email address to your github account. You can have multiple email addresses associated with your account, which comes in useful
3. Activate "two factor authentication" (2FA) on your github account, using these instructions
4. Fill in this very short form with your name, email and github account name
5. Watch out for the email in your imperial inbox, or visit https://github.com/mrc-ide to accept

The form will email people who can set you up - it shouldn't take more than a day or so.

GitHub is sending too many emails

Go to https://github.com/settings/notifications and:

• Untick Automatically watch repositories
• Untick Email under Watching
• Set up an email filter to collect all emails from notifications@github.com to be routed to a folder separate from your inbox (but still keep an eye on it)

Connecting to DIDE without a wired connection

If you are connecting from home, or somewhere outside of DIDE, or even to the Imperial-WPA WiFi within the School of Public Health, you will need to firstly connect with ZScaler, to then access any DIDE resources.

See the instructions here, and note that you sign into ZScaler itself with your IC credentials; once connected, you then can access DIDE network resources (such as network file shares, or remote desktop to DIDE machines) providing your DIDE credentials - where both of these might be different from your local credentials for logging into your laptop. If this is confusing, we explain it with pictures here.

You will also need to use multi-factor authentication - see ICT's instructions here.

For the best network speed and reliability, use a wired network connection wherever possible.

I hear we have a cluster 💻💻💻

Please see the documentation to get started:

• R users: read about hipercow.
• Non R users: Consider becoming at least a part-time R user, as Hipercow makes managing your jobs easier, even if they are not R jobs. Alternatively, there are Windows native tools for job launching, and a very simple web portal, described here but this is not the recommended method (and the docs are old and need updating following the closure of St. Mary's).

You will need your account activated - if you email or message Wes on Teams he can do this for you.

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technical team, go to https://github.com/mrc-ide/technical for the next steps