User Environment
Zilu Wang, Steve Lantz
Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
12/2025 (original)
Vista is the forerunner to Horizon, which will ultimately be one of the largest academic supercomputers in the world. It is a resource provided through The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), where it serves as a bridge to the NSF's Leadership Class Computing Facility (LCCF). Vista, like Horizon, is targeted towards scientific computing projects that require highly capable resources for AI and other HPC applications. It accordingly features NVIDIA "superchips" that closely couple CPUs with GPUs.
This topic will help you in setting up the user environment for your application.
Objectives
After you complete this topic, you should be able to:
- Explain the utility of the TACC Lmod environment module system
- Discuss how to customize a shell and the benefits of doing so
- List ways to set up a user environment using Lmod
- Explain the function of Apptainer on Vista
Prerequisites
Vista is intended as a bridge to a leadership-class system, so its prospective users are already likely to have a high degree of familiarity and experience with HPC and parallel computing. The pace of this topic is meant to be relatively brisk, for that reason.
With that being understood, there are no formal prerequisites for this Virtual Workshop topic. A working knowledge of Linux is recommended; if you need more preparation in Linux, try working through the Linux roadmap first.
CVW material development is supported by NSF OAC awards 1854828, 2321040, 2323116 (UT Austin) and 2005506 (Indiana University)