FOSS 101

Essentials of Free and Open Source Software

The intent of this free course is to help researchers get bootstrapped (i.e., lacing up the shoes before beginning the journey) for endeavors in computational arts, science and engineering. Hope is that the researchers will use the time saved by (semi) automating the often mundane and error-prone manual processes in their workflows towards other meaningful activities (e.g., literature survey, analysis of results, manuscript preparation, synergestic activities, catch up on personal life and hobbies, etc.) and gain more experience.

Apart from being a free, stable and secure Operating System that comes in many flavors (i.e., distributions) and community support, Linux provides support for a plethora of programming and scripting languages (e.g., C, C++, FORTRAN, Julia, PERL, Python, Ruby, BASH, CSH, ZSH, etc.) and thousands of packages to accomplish a variety of tasks. Nearly every high-performance computing infrastructure, including almost all of the Top 500 Supercomputers, is built with some variant the Linux OS.

Every new researcher added to the Michigan Tech's High-Performance Computing Shared Facility (i.e., Superior and Portage) is automatically enrolled in this course. A successful completion is necessary prior to accessing Superior/Portage. Several courses including but not limited to UN5390: Scientific Computing and EE5531: Introduction to Robotics use FOSS101 (or a portion thereof) as a pre-requisite. As of 2022 January, a successful completion of FOSS101 is eligible to earn a digital badge from Michigan Tech that may be displayed in LinkedIn and other professional platforms.

If you are not yet a part of the aforementioned ecosystems or courses but interested in working through this course to advance your own learning, please contact Dr. Gowtham (g@mtu.edu).