Gorgonzola is Capra’s first research server.

Getting Access

You get access by joining a Cornell Active Directory group en-cs-gorgonzola-*, where * is either administrators (which gives you sudo access) or users (which doesn’t). Adrian can add you using Cornell’s AD manager, or the IT staff can add you if you file a ticket.

Please join the #gorgonzola channel on Slack.

Logging In

The hostname is gorgonzola.cs.cornell.edu. Your SSH credentials are your NetID credentials.

Storage

The server has a really small amount of space on /, which includes the home directories. So please don’t put anything big in your $HOME. Whenever possible, use /data, which has plenty of space.

Specs

Technical Support

If any problems come up, please discuss them on the #gorgonzola channel on Slack.

If anything big happens that the group can’t fix on our own, such as if the machine needs a “hard” reboot, the COECIS IT staff can help. You can file a ticket to contact them. On that form, use “Research Computing” for the “Type” field on the ticket.

Software

Docker

Whenever possible, don’t install or upgrade anything locally on the machine. Instead, use Docker. For a guide on how to use Docker, see this blog post.

The docker data directory is at /data/docker. (Please never touch this directory directly.) The placement of the Docker data (which by default lives on our /var filesystem, which has very limited space) is controlled by the systemd unit configuration file at /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/docker.conf, which contains these lines to override the startup config:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -g /data/docker -H fd:// --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock

To avoid needed to prefix docker commands with sudo, you can add yourself to the docker group with:

sudo usermod -a -G docker <netid>

Xilinx tools

The Xilinx tools are not currently installed; please feel free to install them if you’d like!

Synopsys Tools

There are several Synopsys tools available at /opt/synopsys/packages (which comes from a shared filesystem common to several CSL research groups).

For example, here’s one way to use the “VCS-MX” simulator. Set these environment variables to point to the appropriate package and indicate the license server:

export VCS_HOME=/opt/synopsys/packages/vcs-mx/O-2018.09-SP2
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/synopsys/packages/vcs-mx/O-2018.09-SP2/bin
export SNPSLMD_LICENSE_FILE=27000@flex.ece.cornell.edu

Xtensa (Cadence/Tensilica) Tools

There are several Xtensa tools (for DSP programming) installed at opt/xtensa.

Xtensa Xplorer (the GUI) can be run with:

  /opt/xtensa/Xplorer-8.0.11/xplorer

Set these environment variables to run the command line tools:

  export PATH=/opt/xtensa/XtDevTools/install/tools/RI-2019.2-linux/XtensaTools/bin:$PATH
  export LM_LICENSE_FILE=/opt/xtensa/gorgonzola_2020-11-18.lic
  export XTENSA_SYSTEM=/opt/xtensa/XtDevTools/XtensaRegistry/RI-2019.2-linux/
  export XTENSA_CORE=XRC_FUSIONG3_MAX_BM

To compile and run a simple, Tensilica-provided example:

  xt-xcc ex1.c -o example
  xt-run --summary example

Mentor Catapult

We have Mentor’s Catapult HLS 10.5a installed. Use module to access it:

module load mentor-Catapult_synthesis_10.5a

Qualcomm Hexagon SDK

We have the installer for the Qualcomm Hexagon SDK located at /data/qualcomm_hexagon_sdk_3_4_3_eval.bin.

Simply run the script:

sh qualcomm_hexagon_sdk_3_4_3_eval.bin`

NOTE: Rachit already has a local installation. If you’re going to install it, try to do it globally.

Viewing HTML documentation

A lot of EDA tools come with directories of HTML file as their documentation. An easy way to view these on your local machine is through SSH port forwarding.

First, create an SSH tunnel:

ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 user@gorgonzola.cs.cornell.edu

On gorgonzola, navigate to the directory with the HTML files and run:

http-server

On your local machine, the directory will be served to localhost:8080

edit gorgonzola.md