Software maintained by MED Group role account on PPAN

The MED Group Role Account

The MED group now has a role account on PPAN. This account allows any user with access to it to run commands using a separate gfdl account that is shared by everyone. This is useful for ensuring access to shared tools like python environments without duplicating them across individual user accounts.

Using the shared Python environment

The role account is used to maintain a custom Python environment with modules that are useful for many MED users. To use it, run the following on PPAN, your workstation, or a public workstation:

module load miniforge
conda activate /nbhome/role.medgrp/.conda/envs/medpy311

This will add add the shared Python environment to your path and give you read-only access to it.

Accessing the MED group role account

To access the MED group role account, Type the following command on PPAN:

sudo su -l role.medgrp

sudo will then prompt you to enter password: use your RSA token as your sudo password ( both your hidden pin as well as the number that appears on the RSA app).

If you successfully switch over to the MED group user, your directory should change to /home/role.medgrp/. A few things to note about the MED group role account:

1. The default shell is cshell
2. You now have full access to MED group maintained python environments. In particular, the python environment medpy311 should have most of the packages you need to run diagnostic and analysis scripts, as well as download datasets( you can view the packages contained within this environment here). You can activate this environment by running the following commands

module load miniforge
conda activate medpy311

3. Please do not use commands like conda create or conda install as the role account because they will affect everyone using the shared Python environment. Instead, change requests can be made through the GitHub repository for the medpy environment.

If you would like to test the role account and the medpy311 python environment, feel free to follow there instructions in the diagnostics section of the Analyzing Model page to run MED maintained diagnostics using your own account or the role account.

When you are done using the role account, type exit to return to your regular user account.