# Flight Environment Usage

This section provides information about the general purpose features of the Flight User Suite. This includes:

• Flight Basics: The basics of using Flight Solo.
• Flight Desktop: How to use Flight Desktop.
• Ecosystems: The details of Flight Env and package ecosystems.
• Flight Web-Suite: Information about using Flight Web-Suite.

# What is the Flight User Suite?

The Flight User Suite is a collection of environment tools that provide users with easy and intuitive ways to manage the software and desktop sessions in a research environment. The purpose of these tools is to get researchers started with HPC as quickly as possible without needing to worry about their environment, leaving them to do what they do best - research!

The tools are non-intrusive to the research environment, defaulting to a "deactivated" state. Leaving admins and users free to configure and utilise their systems how they want.

Flight User Suite is made up of the following tools:

• Runway: Flight Runway provides a self-contained Ruby environment and an entrypoint for accessing the other flight tools
• Env: Flight Env provides access to, and management of, various software managers to ensure access to a wide variety of HPC applications
• Desktop: Flight Desktop provides an intuitive tool for launching VNC-ready virtual desktops of many different desktop environments (gnome, xterm, kde, etc)
• Starter: Flight Starter provides profile scripts for integrating the user suite into the shell environment
• Job: Flight Job Manager allows you to create and manage customized job scripts from predefined templates, launch jobs and monitor their activity.
• Web: Flight Web Suite allows you to do everything from a more graphical user environment.

# Who is it for?

The Flight User Suite is designed for use by end-users - that's the scientists, researchers, engineers and software developers who actually run compute workloads and process data. This documentation is designed to help these people to get the best out this environment, without needing assistance from teams of IT professionals. Flight provides tools which enable users to service themselves - it's very configurable, and can be expanded by individual users to deliver a scalable platform for computational workloads.