Beast 2 home dir problem

[hrzolix]

I have installed beast 2.7.1 for our user system wide, but every time it makes a ~/.beast directory with base and app dirs. How can I make it to look into his system wide directory and not mine? Users cannot use Beast without it.

This is path: /apps/scientific/beast2/2.7.1

bin
examples
fxtemplates
images
jre
lib
META-INF
ORC
starbeast3

[rbouckaert]

@hrzolix BEAST picks up packages from the user directory (~/.beast by default) as well as the system directory (/usr/local/share/beast by default). These can be changed by setting environment variables: to make it look in /apps/scientific/beast2/2.7.1 set BEAST.system.package.dir=/apps/scientific/beast2/2.7.1.

[hrzolix]

@rbouckaert thank you for the answer. I modified packagemanager and put

-Dbeast.user.package.dir=/apps/scientific/beast2/2.7.1/

now it works!

Also any tips how to speed up the calculations? I have installed beagle to use with cuda, we have A100s. And it is faster with CPU than GPU for some reason.

[rbouckaert]

@hrzolix glad to see it worked out -- note, you'll need to put -Dbeast.user.package.dir=/apps/scientific/beast2/2.7.1/ in the beast script as well for beast to pick up packages from that particular directory.

About speed, it depends very much on the kind of analysis: for CIPRES, benchmarking showed what runs fastest for which kind of data, which is summarised at the bottom of this page: https://www.beast2.org/2021/03/31/command-line-options.html

Your hardware is different, so it may be worth doing a benchmark exercise for your specific configuration, or you can take the table in the link as some guidance.