Pioneer Software

Synopsis

We have adopted a software stack based around toolchains provided by a build automation system known as EasyBuild. The release cycle for EasyBuild toolchains is bi-yearly, and each release bundles current versions of  core utilities and libraries for building software.  For instance the Free and Open Source Software (foss) toolchain bundles updated versions of binutils, GCC, Open MPI, FlexiBLAS, OpenBLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, FFTW and all dependencies, whereas the intel toolchain bundles versions of binutils, GCC, Intel compilers, Intel MPI and Intel MKL. Tables listing the versions included in each intel and foss toolchain are updated as part of the EasyBuild overview of common toolchains documentation.  

The key difference between the Markov and Pioneer software stacks is that Markov uses hierarchies organized by compiler and MPI version (e.g. , one must load gcc/6.3.0 and openmpi/2.0.1 in order to load module R/4.0.2)  whereas on Pioneer dependencies are essentially flat because the compiler and MPI versions are fixed for each toolchain (e.g. loading the foss/2020a toolchain adds GCC 9.3.0 and OpenMPI 4.0.3 to my environment) so we do not need to worry about loading individual versions of dependencies. In addition, the module files created by EasyBuild tend to include the toolchain in the version, and loading the toolchain is generally performed during loading of the software module, so in most cases it is not necessary to load toolchains prior to loading software modules. 

Module System

The module system is Lmod. We have information on basic usage on the Pioneer Module System page.

Working with Modules on Pioneer

Pioneer software has non-hierarchical modules, within a small group of optimization trees keyed to the resources on compute nodes with specific resources (e.g. icosa192gb, gpuv100). There are notes concerning Working with Modules on Pioneer.

Alphabetical List of Software

A list of available software organized alphabetically is maintained on the Pioneer Alphabetical List page.

Categorical List of Software

A compilation of installed software organized by field of science is available on the Pioneer Categorical List page.