Day 1 — Foundations
Day 1 covers the essentials: moving around a Unix system from the command line, connecting to the Yens research cluster over SSH, transferring and organizing files, and version-controlling your work with Git. By the end you’ll be able to log in to a remote cluster, navigate its file system, move data around, and track your work the way researchers do everywhere.
Duration: ~3 hours
We are the DARC team at Stanford GSB — we run the Yens research cluster and support pre-docs like you with the computational side of your work. Joining us today is Ben, a PhD student here at GSB who uses these same tools daily for his own research — he knows exactly what it’s like to be where you are now.
By the end of today you will navigate a remote research server the same way researchers at every university in the world do. Everything you learn here travels with you — to your next job, to a PhD program, and beyond.
Meet Your Party
Four of us are travelling with you this week. Turn over each card to see who they are.
? ? ? Alex Storer Wizard Staff of Arcane Insight DARC team
? ? ? Jeff Ott Cleric Mace of Radiance · Shield of Resolve DARC team
? ? ? Natalya Rapstine Ranger Bow of the Wilds DARC team
? ? ? Ben Barrett Rogue Twin Daggers GSB PhD student
✨ Your party is assembled. Now tick Met the party below. That is a quest — every one you tick is counted in the Quest Log, the ⚔️ button at the bottom-left of every page. ✅ First quest logged. Open the ⚔️ Quest Log at the bottom-left any time to see how far you have come.
Sections
Work through the sections in order — later ones build on earlier ones, and the Day 1 Challenge draws on everything you’ve learned.
| Section | Format | What you’ll learn |
|---|---|---|
| Command Line Basics | 💻 Hands-on | Navigate a Unix file system with core commands: pwd, ls, cd, mkdir, cp, rm |
| Bulk File Operations | 💻 Hands-on | Use wildcards, pipes, grep, and sort to work on many files at once |
| Connecting to a Cluster | 💻 Hands-on | Connect to a remote server and tell interactive nodes from compute nodes |
| The Cluster File System | 💻 Hands-on | Find your way around cluster storage, check your quota, and load software modules |
| Transferring Files (scp) | 💻 Hands-on | Copy files between your machine and the cluster over the shared file system |
| Version Control with Git | 💻 Hands-on | Track your work in Git: fork → branch → commit → push |
| Working with Claude Code | 💻 Hands-on | Set up Claude Code and understand what data it can and can’t be given |
| Day 1 Challenge | 🔑 Capstone | Put everything from today together in an open-ended challenge |