4. File and Directory Naming Conventions

Throughout this Guide, we refer to various files and directories, the precise location of which depends on how and where things were built and installed. All such references will be based on a few key directory locations, which will be determined when you build and install the software (Appendix B, Building the CCA Tools and TAU and Setting Up Your Environment and Appendix C, Building the Tutorial Code Tree). Wherever appropriate, we will write these as environment variables, so that the text in the Guide can simply be pasted into your shell session (assuming your login environment is setup as suggested in Section B.4, “Setting Up Your Login Environment”).

[Warning] Warning

Note that tools such as the Ccaffeine framework do not expand environment variables. In these cases, you'll need to type in the complete path, substituting the placeholder (i.e. “TUTORIAL_SRC”) with the actual path.

If you're participating in an organized tutorial, you will be given information separately about the particular paths corresponding to these locations.

CCA_TOOLS_ROOT ($CCA_TOOLS_ROOT)

The installation location of the CCA tools. (See Section B.1, “The CCA Tools”.)

TAU_ROOT ($TAU_ROOT)

The installation location of the TAU Portable Profiling package. (See Section B.3, “Downloading and Installing TAU”.)

TAU_CMPT_ROOT ($TAU_CMPT_ROOT)

The installation location of the TAU performance component. (See Section B.3, “Downloading and Installing TAU”.)

TUTORIAL_SRC ($TUTORIAL_SRC)

The location that the tutorial-src-version.tar.gz file was unpacked and built. (See Appendix C, Building the Tutorial Code Tree.)

WORKDIR ($WORKDIR)

This is the location of a working directory, in which you can carry out all of the exercises in this Guide. The basic requirements are that you have write access and sufficient disk space for the work (perhaps 100 MB), and if you're working through the tutorial independently, you can usually choose the WORKDIR based on your knowledge of the system you're using. If you're part of an organized tutorial, you will be assigned a WORKDIR.

[Important] Important

If you're part of an organized tutorial please be careful to use the WORKDIR you are assigned! Often there are special considerations in such an environment, which might not be obvious to you as a participant. For example, it is fairly common for all cluster nodes to mount user home directories from a single NFS file server. An entire class of students working on I/O-intensive activities (like building the tutorial code) at the same time has been known to kill servers from time to time. So frequently, you will be asked to use directories local to your assigned cluster node.