Installing Altair SLC and Altair Analytics Workbench on Linux systems

IanBD
IanBD
Altair Employee
edited June 19 in Altair RapidMiner

Prerequisites

Altair SLC and Altair Analytics Workbench are supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (or equivalent distribution) or later running on x86_64, AARCH64, PowerPC (LE), or s390x hardware.

You will need to have administrative access to install Altair SLC or Altair Analytics Workbench.

There are no other prerequisites.

Installation

Altair SLC and Altair Analytics Workbench are separate RPM installation packages or compressed tar archives which can be downloaded from the Altair One marketplace at www.altairone.com.You will require a username and password to access the download section of the site. The installation packages are:

  • altairanalyticsworkbench-<version>-linux-x86_64.rpm
  • altairslc-<version>-linux-x86_64.rpm

Where <version> is the release version of the installation package.

  • To use Altair Analytics Workbench only, for example to connect to a remote installation of the Altair SLC engine, you require the altairanalyticsworkbench-<version>-linux-x86_64.rpm installation package.
  • To use Altair Analytics Workbench and the Altair SLC engine on the same device, you require both installation packages. Ensure that you have the same release version for both installation packages.
  • To use the Altair SLC engine only, for example on a Windows Server, you require the altairslc-<version>-linux-x86_64.rpminstallation package.

Use of the Altair SLC engine is controlled by means of a license which must be applied after installation. If only Altair Analytics Workbench is installed on a workstation, that workstation will not require a license.

RPM package

To install the package requires the ability to use the sudo command to gain administrator privilege.

The default installation location is /opt/altair/slc/<version>.

After downloading the package, install using the following command:

 sudo rpm --install /<filepath>/<installation-file>.rpm

Compressed tar

If you are not installing using the package files, download the following compressed archives:

  • altairanalyticsworkbench-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
  • altairslc-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

To install, change (cd) to a suitable installation location to which you have write-access. Extract the files from the required archive using gunzip and tar as follows.

  1. Unzip or untar the installation file by typing: 
    tar -xzof <installation-file>.tar.gz

    or:

    gzip -cd <installation-file>.tar.gz | tar xvf -

The archive is completely self-contained and can be unpacked anywhere. The installation location can be somewhere that requires root access such as /opt if installing for all users, or it can be in your home directory.

Appling a license

A license is required to run Altair SLC, this can be either Altair Units or a wpskey license file.

Altair Units are served from either a License Manager hosted by Altair (HHWU) or an on-site Altair License Manager (ALM). A wpskey license file is downloaded from the my account section of the World Programming website.

If a workstation has both Altair SLC and Altair Analytics Workbench installed, the license can be applied through Workbench. For more information see the Altair Analytics Workbench User Guide in your installation, or available from the Altair community documentation site (https://help.altair.com).

Where only Altair SLC is installed on your device:

  • If using the Altair hosted license server.
    1. Log in to your Altair One account.
    2. In your user profile page, obtain an Altair One authorization code for the device hosting Altair SLC.

      Note that this code has a limited usage time.

    3. On the device hosting Altair SLC, you may wish to set this environment variable (for all users of SLC) to force Altair One managed units to be used: 
      export ALM_HHWU=TRUE
    4. On the same device, run the following command:
almutil -a1auth -code <auth-code>

or if you are wanting to authorize ALL users of this machine then use the command:

sudo almutil -a1auth -code <auth-code> -system

Where <auth-code> is the Altair One authorization code.

This command downloads a configuration file to the default location of /usr/local/altair/altair_hostedhwu.cfg.

  • If using an on-site Altair License Manager.
    1. On the device hosting Altair SLC, specify the ALM_HHWU environment variable: 
      export ALM_HHWU=FALSE
    2. On the same device, set the ALTAIR_LICENSE_PATH environment variable: 
      export ALTAIR_LICENSE_PATH=<port>@&lt;host>

      Where:

      • <port> is the port on the which the license server communicates.
      • <host> is the hostname of the license server

When creating environment variables, we recommend creating a Bash shell script called wpsenv.sh that exports this and any other environment variables you create for Altair SLC. Using the shell script enables these variables to be sourced from system Bash shell scripts.

  • If using a wpskey license file.
    1. Download the license key file from the World Programming website.
    2. On the device hosting Altair SLC, enter the following command: 
      <installation-dir>/bin/wps -setinit -stdio < <wps-key-file>

      Where <wps-key-file> is the path to the downloaded license key file.

A message will confirm the license has been applied successfully.

Environment variables

Note: The following recommendation assumes that you use the Bash shell.

Using Altair SLC with third-party applications, such as database servers, requires that the environment information needs to be available when Altair SLC is invoked, such as:

  • LD_LIBRARY_PATH, for example pointing to client libraries for a database.
  • PATH, for example pointing to the bin folder for unixODBC.
  • ODBCSYSINI, pointing to the unixODBC client libraries

If you have not set these environment variables in another way, we recommend creating a Bash shell script called wpsenv.sh that exports these variables so that they can be sourced from system Bash shell scripts.

If Altair SLC is used by multiple users, you should consider setting global environment variables:

  1. Create a folder called altairslc in /etc and in this folder, create a wpsenv.sh shell script.
  2. This file should be sourced from both the /etc/profile and /etc/bashrc files to ensure that the variables are available to Altair SLC.

If Altair SLC is to be used by individual users, you should set the variables through a Bash shell script in the user's home directory:

  1. Create a folder called .altairslc in the home directory. In this folder, create a wpsenv.sh shell script.
  2. This file should be sourced from ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile to ensure that the variables are available to Altair SLC.
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