If you are from Université de Lille, you may access the servers of the university via the Cloud platform OpenStack. This would allow you to create a VM(virtual machine) to use N2S3 without installing anything on your own machine and take advantage of the Cloud's resources.

To create an account on OpenStack, you will have to send an email request, check this link for more informations :
http://hpc.univ-lille.fr/acces/cloud-openstack

To access OpenStack with your account :
https://thor.univ-lille.fr/dashboard/auth/login/

Be sure to read the OpenStack online documentation before using it :
http://hpc.univ-lille.fr/cloud-openstack/documentation

An image containing everything you need to use and modify N2S3 is available on OpenStack.

It is called cper-data-n2s3-[creation_date].

You can create your own VM instance based on this image.

First, go to the “Compute → Instances” page, and click the “Launch an instance” button.

You will then have some parameters to choose, let's see the mandatory ones :

1. the name of the instance, for example [your_name]-n2s3
2. the source image, use the cper-data-n2s3-[creation_date]
3. the flavor, it will determine the resources you will get one your VM. It goes from 4Go RAM and 1 CPU, to 500Go RAM and 20 CPU. If you just want to modify N2S3, you should use 1 or 2 cores, whereas if you want to launch big simulations, you might want to use 10 or 20 cores.
4. the network, we usually use Émeraude network since N2S3 was created by Émeraude but you might want to use another network depending on the team you're working in.
5. the security groups and the ssh key, they will allow you to connect to your VM. Without them you won't be able to access your VM. You should read the OpenStack documentation to see how to create them.

You have to give your VM a floating IP address by clicking on the drop down menu on the right of your instance in order to access it.

You can then access your VM by using this command :

ssh -Xi /.ssh/cloud-hpc-lille centos@[floating_ip_address]

You'll find yourself on a terminal in the /home/centos directory.

The n2s3 files are in the /home/centos/n2s3 directory and were installed using git. You should be able to use git if you have an allowed user account on the n2s3 project.

You can go directly in this directory to use n2s3 with SBT or Scala, or you can use IntelliJ to modify and use it.

IntelliJ is installed using Snap, it is installed in the /home/centos/snap directory and you can launch it using this command :

intellij-idea-community

You can launch multiple simulations at the same time using launcher.sh or Launcher.scala.

example using the ExampleDigitalHex with 2 simulations :
- the shell script is used with :

./scripts/launcher.sh examples fr.univ_lille.cristal.emeraude.n2s3.apps.ExampleDigitalHex 2

- the scala script is used with :

sbt "run examples fr.univ_lille.cristal.emeraude.n2s3.apps.ExampleDigitalHex 2"

A better documentation is inside the files themselves.