As a convenient editor for TeX file under Windows, WinEdit is quite popular. However, if you do not get your WinEdit registered (of course, it is not free), you will get annoyed by the popup window, which gets appeared frequently after you have used WinEdit without registration for certain time period. This post provides a hack way to deal with it.

Find Configuration File “Exit.edt”

options -> options interfaces … -> Advanced Configuration … -> Event Handlers -> Exit

the file looks like this:

// WinEdt Exit (Cleanup) Macro
 
   PushTagsandRegisters;
 
//  CloseAppl("YAP");         // Close YAP if running?
//  CloseAppl("Complete");    // Close Complete Wizard if running?

// Remove Local ini and edt files if they are empty or the same as global
// Users probably forget to do this before upgrading
// so it is best to keep it tidy as we go...

Exe('%b\Config\Cleanup.edt');

PopTagsandRegisters;

End; 

Add Following Sentence Just Before “End;”

RegDeleteValue('HKEY_CURRENT_USER', 'Software\WinEdt 9', 'Inst');

Not sure whether it works for WinEdit 10.

Close WinEdit and Reopen

Notice

Note that, we do not recommend you to use this solution. If you really cannot afford the registration, then Sublime Text together with LaTeXTools would be a good conditionally free substitute. Tis installation and configuration of Sublime Text with LaTeXTools can be found in Play LaTeX Projects with Sublime Text 3.

When uploading papers to EDAS (or other paper submission site), you might encounter a problem which is called as “Not All Fonts are Embedded”. Today, I’ll give you a relatively easy and convenient solution for Windows (for other OSes, solutions are similar).

Steps

Download and Install The Proper Ghostscript

Note that, in the following steps, I will assume the GS is installed at “C:/Program Files/gs”!

Change Configuration of WinEdit

1. Locate the settings of “ps2pdf”: Winedit -> Option -> Exectution Modes -> ps2pdf, as shown in the following figure,

   

2. Click “Browse for executable…” at the left-bottom, and select the “gswin32c.exe” at “C:/Program Files/gs/gs9.02/bin/”

   

3. Fill “Switches” entry with the following setting (if it was not empty before filling, then just replace the original one),

    -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress  -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true
   

   as shown in the following figure,

   

4. Replace the original setting in “Parameters” entry with the following one,

    -sOutputFile="%N.pdf" -c save pop -f "%N.ps"
   

   as shown in the following figure,

   

5. Click “OK”

EPS figures are very important to scholars. However, making eps figures, especially high-quality ones is not an easy task. Today, we will introduce a simple method easily finish this tough task with visio.

Tools are needed

1. Visio
2. Adobe Acrobat
3. GSView

HOWTO

1. Use Visio to draw a figure (i.e., the figure to be transformed to eps)

2. Print this figure to PDF format in Visio by using Adobe Acrobat Printer. Note that, make sure your figure is located in a single page, and you are suggested to use high-quality printer.

3. Open the PDF generated in Step 2 by using Adobe Acrobat, and saveas “eps”. Note that, though you obtain the eps file already in this step, but usually this file could not satisfy your requirement. Therefore, you need still come to Step 4.

4. Open the EPS generated in Step 3 by using GSview, and then “File”/”PS to EPS”, check “Automatically calculate Bounding Box” if it isn’t, and then press “Yes”. Eventually, you get the desired EPS figure.

Notice

If your figure is very regular (with only certain regular-shape stuffs, for example a combination of rectangles/circles/lines.), Tikz might be a very good tool for producing eps figures. This repository provides some useful examples. If you want more, if can go to TeXample.net. In the future, we will provide some specific examples which we encountered in some of our projects.

This post introduces how to build a simple MPI cluster with certain UBUNTU machines.

Build MPI Cluster

Here we have 4 nodes running UBUNTU server with these host names: ub0, ub1, ub2, ub3.

Configure hostnames

Edit _/etc/hosts_ like these:

127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.109.103 ub0
192.168.109.104 ub1
192.168.109.106 ub2
192.168.109.107 ub3

Install NFS

NFS allows us to create a folder on the master node and have it synced on all the other nodes. This folder can be used to store programs. To install NFS just run the following command in the master node’s terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install nfs-server

To install the client program on other nodes, run this command on each of them:

$ sudo apt-get install nfs-client

Sharing Master Folder

Make a folder in all nodes, we’ll store our data and program in this folder.

$ sudo makedir /mirror

And then we share the contents of this folder on the master node to all the other nodes. In order to do this we first edit the /etc/exports file on the master node to contain the following line

/mirror *(rw,sync)

This can be done by using a text editor such as vim or by using the following command:

$ echo "/mirror *(rw,sync)" | sudo tee -a /etc/exports

Now restart the nfs service on the master to parse this configuration once again by using the following command:

$ sudo service nfs-kernel-server restart

Note, then we store our data and programs only in the master node and other nodes are able to access them with NFS.

Mounting /master in Nodes

Now all we need to do is to mount the folder on other nodes. This can be done by using:

$ sudo mount ub0:/mirror /mirror

But it’s better to change fstab in order to mount it on every boot. We do this by editing /etc/fstab and adding the following line:

ub0:/mirror /mirror nfs

and remounting all partitions by using the following on all the slave nodes:

$ sudo mount -a

Defining a User for Running MPI Programs

We define a user with same name and same userid in all nodes with a home directory in /mirror.

Here we name it “mpiu”! Also we change the owner of /mirror to mpiu:

$ sudo chown mpiu /mirror

Installing SSH Server

Run the following command in all the nodes in order to install openSSH server:

$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Setting up Passwordless SSH

First we login with our new user to the master node:

$ su - mpiu

Then we generate an RSA key pair for mpiu:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

You can keep the default ~/.ssh/id_rsa location. It is suggested to enter a strong passphrase for security reasons.

Next, we add this key to authorized keys:

$ cd .ssh
$ cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys

As the home directory of mpiu in all nodes is the same (i.e., /mirror/mpiu), there is no need to run these commands on all nodes. If you didn’t mirror the home directory, though, you can use ssh-copy-id to copy a public key to another machine's authorized_keys file safely.

To test SSH, you can run the following command on ub0:

$ ssh ub1 hostname

If you are asked to enter a passphrase every time, you need to set up a keychain. This is done easily by installing Keychain by using:

$ sudo apt-get install keychain

And to tell it where your keys are and to start an ssh-agent automatically edit your ~/.bashrc file to contain the following lines (where id_rsa is the name of your private key file):

if type keychain >/dev/null 2>/dev/null; then
   keychain --nogui -q id_rsa
   [ -f ~/.keychain/${HOMENAME}-sh ] && . ~/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh
   [ -f ~/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh-gpg ] && . ~/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh-gpg
fi

Exit and login once again or do a source ~/.bashrc for the change to take effect.

Now your hostname via ssh command should return the other node’s hostname without asking for a password or passphrase. Check that this works for all the slave nodes.

Install GCC

To be able to compile all the code on our master node (it’s sufficient to do it only there if we do inside the /mirror folder and all the libraries are in place on other machines) we need a compiler.

You can get gcc and other necessary stuff by install the build-essential package:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

Install Other Compilers

Other preferred compilers should be installed before installing MPICH.

In this step you may install other compilers such as SGI compiler …

Install MPICH2

Now the last ingredient we need installed on all the machines is the MPI implementation. You can install MPICH2 using:

$ sudo apt-get install mpich2

To test that the program did indeed install successfully, enter the following command on all the machines:

which mpiexec
which mpirun

Setting up a Machinefile

Create a file named “machinefile” in mpiu’s home directory with node names followed by a colon and a number of processes to spawn:

ub3:4 # this will spawn 4 processes on ub3
ub2:2
ub1   # this will spawn 1 process on ub1
ub0 

Testing

Change directory to your mirror folder and write this MPI hellowworld program in a file mpi_hello.c:

#include<stdio.h>
#inlcude<mpi.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv){
    int myrank, nprocs;
    MPI_Init(&argc,&argv);
    MPI_Comm_size(MPI_COMM_WORLD,&nprocs);
    MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD,&myrank);
    printf("Hello from processor %d of %d\n",myrank,nprocs);
    MPI_Finalize();
    return 0;
}

compile it:

$ mpicc mpi_hello.c -o mpi_hello

and run it:

mpiexec -n 8 -f machinefile ./mpi_hello

You should now see output similar to:

Hello from processor 0 of 8
Hello from processor 1 of 8
Hello from processor 2 of 8
Hello from processor 3 of 8
Hello from processor 4 of 8
Hello from processor 5 of 8
Hello from processor 6 of 8
Hello from processor 7 of 8