How to Select, Configure and Install ESM Software Stacks (D3.5)

31 August 2018:

ATTENTION, this deliverable has been updated with Deliverable D3.6 Zenodo link: https://zenodo.org/record/1453864#.W7248faYTwk

Summary

Nowadays, to build, run and configure up-to-date weather and climate models it takes more components than solely the source codes. Models are subject to a long list of dependencies in the form of libraries, open source and/or commercial software packages or many other pieces of software such as system utilities. These requirements make the life of system administrators in HPC centres hard. When a new user gets resources on a specific platform, it will take time before the actual simulations can start, because platform related problems with models and software need to be solved first.

The aim of this deliverable is to explain the methodology to select, configure and install a complete ESM software stack in a handbook. This handbook is intended to ease the deployment of models and to reduce the time to start simulations at an HPC facility. The time to solution from idea to published result should thus be substantially reduced. Ideally, following the guidelines in this document, the centres willing to run weather and climate models will be prepared to offer all the tools required by these models, and their users, the scientists.

As a matter of precision, in this document we do not define the software stack needed for a centre to run weather and climate models. This definition comes from the deliverable D3.1 of ESiWACE.