Not enough space for Conda environments

[tavareshugo]

In the course iteration 2022-07-14, when we all created the scipy environment (here), we started getting errors because /home ran out of space.

Some solutions:

• Increase the space needed for everyone to have their own environment
• Find a way to use a common cache, which would have two advantages: we don't need to purchase more storage and installation would run quicker.

Our quick-and-dirty solution was:

mv ~/miniconda3/ /scratch/$USER/
ln -s /scratch/$USER/miniconda3/ ~/miniconda3

[tavareshugo]

We will increase the space to avoid this problem again.

Another thing that should do is cache the packages needed for numpy and matplotlib to make installation quicker.

This should work:

conda install -y -c conda-forge numpy=1.23.1 matplotlib=3.5.2
conda remove -y --force numpy matplotlib

This should remove those two packages, without removing the dependencies. So the installation process later on is quicker.

Also, update the materials to install those specific versions of the packages, otherwise newer versions (with different dependencies) might end up being downloaded.

[tavareshugo]

Add TODOs to this comment:

• [ ] Cache conda environments
• [ ] Make sure there's enough /home space

[tavareshugo]

conda environment now lives on /scratch