Environment Setup

What you need to run code on PACE, Georgia Tech's research cluster. Start here, then read PACE.

Accounts

• A PACE account. See Get Started with PACE.
• Membership in a project account, added by your project lead. Jobs are charged to it, so nothing runs without one.
• The GlobalProtect VPN when you are off campus. Login nodes do not answer from the open internet.

On your laptop

• GitHub CLI: run gh auth login and choose SSH. It creates and uploads a key if you need one.
• uv: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh.
• VS Code with the Python, Ruff, Jupyter, and Remote - SSH extensions.

Set your commit identity once per machine, including later on PACE:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

Python projects

We use uv for Python itself, environments, and dependencies:

uv init my-project && cd my-project
uv add pandas scikit-learn   # installs, and records the version in uv.lock
uv run python train.py       # runs in the project environment, no activation
uv sync                      # rebuilds .venv from the lock file elsewhere

pyproject.toml and uv.lock fully describe the environment, so anyone can reproduce it and you can throw .venv away at any time.