These software installations are maintained by Jon Rood for the HPACF group at NREL and are tailored to the applications our group develops. The list of available modules can be seen in modules.txt. They are open to anyone to use on our machines. The software installations are organized by date snapshots. The binaries, compilers, and utilties are not updated as often as the software modules, so dated symlinks might point to older dates for those. However, each date snapshot of the modules should be able to stand on its own so that older snapshots can be purged safely over time.
- "base" is just a newer version of GCC to replace the system GCC 4.8.5 which is far too old to build many recent projects.
- "binaries" are generally the binary downloads of Paraview and Visit.
- "compilers" are the latest set of compilers built using the base GCC.
- "utilities" are the latest set of utility programs that don't rely on MPI and are built using the base GCC.
- "software" are the latest set of generally larger programs and dependencies that rely on MPI. Each date corresponds to a single MPI implementation so there is no confusion as to which MPI was used for the applications. These modules are built using a farily recent GCC, Clang, or Intel compiler provided from the "compilers" modules, using the highest optimization flags specific to the machine architecture.
The Spack hierarchy is linked in the following manner where each installation is based on other upstream Spack installations. "software" depends on "utilities", which both depend on "compilers". This hierarchy allows Spack to point to packages it needs which are already built upstream. The "compilers" installation exposes only the modules for compilers, while the "utilities" modules inherit modules from itself as well as the dependency packages in the "compilers" installation except the compiler modules themselves.
Currently there is no perfect way to advertise deprecation or addition, and evolution of these modules. I have an MOTD you can cat in your login script to see updates. Generally the latest 4 sets of modules will likely be kept and new sets have been showing up around every 3 to 6 months.
To use these modules you can add the following to your ~/.bashrc for example and choose the module set (date) you prefer, and the GCC or Intel compiled software modules:
#------------------------------------------
#MPT 2.22
#MODULES=modules-2020-07
#COMPILER=gcc-8.4.0
#COMPILER=clang-10.0.0
#COMPILER=intel-18.0.4
#MPICH 3.3.1
#MODULES=modules-2019-10-08
#COMPILER=gcc-7.4.0
#COMPILER=clang-7.0.1
#COMPILER=intel-18.0.4
#MPICH 3.3
#MODULES=modules-2019-05-23
#COMPILER=gcc-7.4.0
#COMPILER=intel-18.0.4
#MPICH 3.3
#MODULES=modules-2019-05-08
#COMPILER=gcc-7.4.0
#COMPILER=intel-18.0.4
#MPICH 3.3
#MODULES=modules-2019-01-10
#COMPILER=gcc-7.3.0
#COMPILER=intel-18.0.4
#Recommended default according to where "modules" is currently symlinked
MODULES=modules
COMPILER=gcc-8.4.0
#COMPILER=clang-10.0.0
#COMPILER=intel-18.0.4
module purge
module unuse ${MODULEPATH}
module use /nopt/nrel/ecom/hpacf/binaries/${MODULES}
module use /nopt/nrel/ecom/hpacf/compilers/${MODULES}
module use /nopt/nrel/ecom/hpacf/utilities/${MODULES}
module use /nopt/nrel/ecom/hpacf/software/${MODULES}/${COMPILER}
module load gcc
module load git
module load python
#etc...
#------------------------------------------
If module avail does not show the modules on Eagle, try removing the LMOD cache with rm -rf ~/.lmod.d/.cache
Also included in this directory is a recommended Spack configurations you can use to build your own packages on the machines supported at NREL. Once you have SPACK_ROOT set you can run /nopt/nrel/ecom/hpacf/spack-configs/scripts/setup-spack.sh which should copy the yaml files into your instance of Spack. Or you can copy the yaml files into your ${SPACK_ROOT}/etc directory manually. spack compilers should then show you many available compilers. Source your Spack's setup-env.sh after you do the module unuse ${MODULEPATH} in your .bashrc so that your Spack instance will add its own module path to MODULEPATH. Remove ~/.spack/linux if it exists and spack compilers doesn't show you the updated list of compilers. The ~/.spack directory takes highest precendence in the Spack configuration.