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Software on Ponyland

Various categories of software are available on ponyland. There are the globally installed packages, automatically available for everyone, there was an extensive LaMachine installation (now deprecated) with a lot more software which you explicitly need to activate, there is the possibility to run your own containers, and there is extra software for which you also have to explicitly opt-in. The latter is organized in so called namespaces.

Globally installed

Amongst the globally installed packages are all common unix tools, various compilers and interpreters. A full exhaustive list of all installed packaged can be obtained through dpkg -l. Below is a list of the most notable software.

Experiment framework

Compilers and interpreters

  • gcc/g++ (5.4)
  • python (2.7)
  • python3 (3.5)
  • perl (5.22)
  • java/javac (Java 8, OpenJDK 1.8)
  • R (3.2)
  • matlab
  • octave (open-source matlab alternative)

Research Tools

  • Dact Dact is a tool for viewing and analyzing Alpino corpora
  • Praat doing phonetics by computer

Version control

Using some form version control for maintaining your code is highly recommended!

  • git (See: git)
  • svn (subversion)
  • bzr (bazaar)
  • hg (mercurial)
  • cvs

Container platform

We offer Apptainer (formerly known as Singularity) as a container platform. It can interoperate with OCI/Docker containers. Please see containers_on_ponyland.

Editors

  • vi/vim
  • emacs
  • joe
  • nano/pico (easiest for beginners, but very few features)
  • Graphical Editors (Use xforwarding)
    • gedit
    • Sublime Text

text (namespace texteditors)

Other

  • latex/pdflatex/tex
  • gnuplot
  • pdf2txt
  • graphviz (dot/circo/etc)
  • antiword

LaMachine

(Previously maintained by Maarten van Gompel. now deprecated)

NOTE: LAMACHINE IS NOW DEPRECATED!!! - Depending on the particular software you are interested in, we direct you to use either Python virtual environments or Containers

LaMachine offered a large collection of NLP software, including all in-house software developed by the Language Machines research group. Most of the software by Antal van den Bosch, Maarten van Gompel, Ko van der Sloot, and others can be found here. See https://proycon.github.io/LaMachine for complete information.

As a lot of our software and development is Python based, LaMachine came with a sizeable collection of third party libraries, in addition to our own libraries.

LaMachine on Ponyland is set up as a Virtual Environment, to activate LaMachine from the shell (bash or zsh only), or from within a shell script, just type:

lm

or full long form:

source /vol/customopt/bin/lamachine-activate

Your prompt will then be prepended with (lamachine) and your $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH will be updated. Note that python and python3 will now both refer to the Python 3 interpreter (outside of the environment, python would refer to the global Python 2.7 installation).

Our software:

Third-party Python libraries:

  • Numpy
  • Scipy
  • Matplotlib
  • Seaborn
  • Pandas
  • Scikit Learn
  • PyCrypto
  • PyCurl
  • Django
  • Cython
  • CherryPy
  • IPython
  • NLTK
  • Textblob
  • Keras
  • Theano
  • Tensorflow

NOTE: The default LaMachine environment contained the latest stable releases of our own and third-party but is now deprecated and no longer maintained. Versions may be behind! Different versions may affect the outcome of experiments! Always log the software version for full reproducibility! See lamachine-list

In addition to the stable versions, you can also opt for a LaMachine virtual environment that contains the very latest bleeding edge git versions of all software. This is more volatile, may break at any moment, and is intended for testing the newest features. Activate the development LaMachine as follows:

lmdev

or full long form:

source /vol/customopt/bin/lamachine-dev-activate

For the development LaMachine, you can trigger an update yourself by running trigger-update.sh on applejack (mlp01).

Opt-in: namespaces

Namespaces group certain software for which you have to explicitly opt-in. This is done so the software may not cause any conflicts with any versions of the same software you may have installed locally. Setting a namespace means that your $PATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, $PYTHONPATH and various other environment variables will be extended to include software in the namespace. All namespaces are in /vol/customopt/.

To use a namespace, add either of the following to the bottom of the file ~/.bash_profile:

# Load namespace:
. pathadd $namespace

# Silently load namespace:
. pathadd -s $namespace

The initial . is important (it is an alias to source, but works in all shells). Substitute $namespace by the namespace, for example uvt-ru. You can add multiple lines with multiple namespaces.

The following namespaces exist and contain the software mentioned below:

1. kaldi

(Maintained by Maarten van Gompel)

. pathadd kaldi

All this does is set $KALDI_ROOT to /vol/customopt/kaldi, where kaldi is installed globally for all to use (read-only).

2. machine-learning

(Maintained by admin, requested by Iris Hendrickx)

. pathadd machine-learning

Contains Machine Learning tools

LCS quirks

The admin gets a lot of questions about the apparent non-functioning of LCS. It does work, but needs a number of requirements satisfied. Please read this before you ask for help:

  • Java requires the option to present something visually (but does not use it). Make sure you have X-forwarding enabled, or run in headless mode (-Djava.awt.headless=true)
  • LCS only seems to work in your home directory; not on network disks.
  • LCS caches files. Remove the cache folder before each run.
  • What LCS calls 'data' is where your store your models, what LCS calls 'files' is where your store your data.
  • "Missing too many documents in index" can also refer to the fact that your models folder (called 'files' int he config file) or cache folder is not reachable by Winnow.
  • When the test file has an incorrect format, LCS strangely complains about the training file being a directory.
  • When you are using the incorrect version of Java (correct version is Java 6), LCS in some cases complains with the error 'comparisonmethod violates its general contract'.
  • The details of the results seem to be influenced by the names of the training files.

3. SyntaxNet

Because SyntaxNet has so many dependencies, it did not fit into an existing namespace. Instead, it is a separate virtualenv that you can access by running this command:

source /vol/customopt/syntaxnet/bin/activate

4. alpino

(obsolete, use a container instead)

5. nlptools

(Maintained by Maarten van Gompel & admin)

. pathadd nlptools

Contains various 3rd party software for Natural Language Processing

Stanford Ner:

# Use shortcut:
ner myfile.txt

# Or
cd /vol/customopt/nlptools/stanford-ner
java -mx600m edu.stanford.nlp.ie.crf.CRFClassifier -loadClassifier classifiers/english.all.3class.distsim.crf.ser.gz -textFile sample.txt

If you want to use Gurobi, please obtain your own Gurobi license by:

6. texteditors

Maintained by admin

. pathadd texteditors

7. mongodb

Maintained by admin, requested by Ali Huerriyetoglu

. pathadd mongodb

mkdir ~/mongodb
PORT=3573 # Choose a port above 1024
mongod --dbpath ~/mongodb --port $PORT

See http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/program/mongod/#bin.mongod for more options.

8. nodebox

Requested by Peter Berck

. pathadd nodebox

Python Library (Nodebox Linguistics Library)

  • linguistics library (import en)

9. r4

 . pathadd r412

R, software package for statistical computing. This updates the older, globally installed version (3.2) to R4.1.2, of November 2021.

10. python3

// (Obsolete, abandoned) //

11. python2-packages

//(No longer maintained, we recommend you use Python 3 instead (with LaMachine if needed)). Set up your own Python2.7 virtualenv otherwise //

12. python36

(Maintained by admin)

. pathadd python36

13. python38

(Maintained by admin)

. pathadd python38

14. redis

Requested by Emmanuel Chamilakis

https://redis.io version 5.0.7

Installation guide that was followed: https://techmonger.github.io/40/redis-without-root

. pathadd redis

PORT=7777 # Choose a port above 1024
MYREDISCONF=~/myredis.conf # Copy and change /vol/customopt/redis507/redis.conf
redis-server $MYREDISCONF --port $PORT

15. NodeJS

(Maintained by admin)

. pathadd nodejs

Current version: v18.18.2