Software & File Systems

Getting Started: Software & File Systems

Available Software

Our centrally provided software installations are offered through modules (also see hpc-wiki.info/hpc/Modules). The LMod command module is used to make certain programs in a specific version available to your current shell.

You can load modules from the EESSI Projects through /cvmfs/software.eessi.io, or local centrally provided modules located in /beegfs/tools. We recommend trying the EESSI approach first, as described in our Software documentation.

As a general example, to load a GCC 10.3.0 from our local software stack you can run:

$ module spider GCC/10.3.0
--------------------------------------------
  GCC: GCC/10.3.0
--------------------------------------------
    Description:
      The GNU Compiler Collection includes front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++, libgcj,...).


    You will need to load all module(s) on any one of the lines below before the "GCC/10.3.0" module is available to load.

      2021a
[...]
$ module load 2021a GCC/10.3.0
$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 10.3.0
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE

Notice the “2021a” module. We use a hierarchical module naming scheme, which means that modules only become available, if their dependencies are loaded. The 2021a module serves as an entry point into a software stack with a collection of many programs in a certain version. A more recent entry module, e.g. 2022a, is likely to contain more recent versions of the software. module spider will find any version available and using it with name/version will tell you exactly how to load the program.

For more information, please consult our Software documentation.

File Systems

On our cluster, we have the following storage systems:

Workernode local storage in /tmp (no backup!): 2TB of fast SSD storage per node. Great place for active work directories in jobs.
BeeGFS in /beegfs (no backup!): >900TB shared storage accessible in all nodes. Home directory to all users and intended for storing results and organizing data. I/O intensive jobs should avoid on interacting directly with /beegfs.
CVMFS in /cvmfs: Read-only storage to distribute special software.
NFS in /common/home (regular backup): Home directory for users of the whep group

For more information, please consult our file system documentation.