User interaction with Frontera consists primarily of entering commands into a Linux shell. The purpose of this topic is to help you become comfortable in working with the shell environment on Frontera.

Once you have received an allocation and gained access to Frontera via SSH, you will find yourself in a login shell for your user account. Like all of Frontera's nodes, the login nodes run the CentOS 7 Linux distribution as their operating system. Upon login, a system script runs to perform session setup for you, including displaying information about your account balance and system dialogs, after which you are presented with a shell prompt.

The default shell environment can be tailored by different environment variables and customizations that are available. You will discover that the TACC Lmod Environment Module System is a particularly important and convenient tool for managing the active packages, compilers, and software in your shell environment.

For users who prefer a desktop environment, or who require visualization software, the ability to connect to a remote desktop is available, as outlined in the Visualization and VNC Sessions section of the Frontera User Guide. This capability will not be covered here, though we will touch on it briefly later, in the section on Interactive Jobs in the Running Jobs topic. In any case, the ability to work in an interactive, text-based shell is important even for those users who choose to connect via remote desktop.