Software Environments and their Differences

Introduction

Various environments are configured on our HPC. Depending on which program versions and compilers you need to use, a different environment has to be loaded.

Choosing the Right Environment

Three environments are currently installed that may be of interest to you:

• hpc-env/6.4
• hpc-uniol-env
• hpc-env/8.3

The main differences between these different environments are the GCC-compilers as well as the installed modules.

After logging in, the standard environment hpc-uniol-env will apply to your session. Enter the following command...

$ module available

... to display all available modules within the current environment.

To choose the right environment you should know which program version you need. For example, if you want to use the latest installed version of Anaconda, enter ...

$ module spider Anaconda

... to display all available installed versions and the program description. Spider now shows that two program versions are available:

Anaconda3/4.3.0
Anaconda3/5.1.0
Anaconda3/5.3.0
Anaconda3/2019.10
Anaconda3/2020.02
Anaconda3/2020.11

Now you can display the respective environment by adding the version number to the entry:

$ module spider Anaconda3/2020.11

Output:

You will need to load all module(s) on any one of the lines below before the "Anaconda3/2020.11" module is available to load.

hpc-env/8.3

In this example, you have to change the environment to hpc-env/6.4 in order to use the preferred version of Anaconda.

$ module load hpc-env/8.3

You will notice that the command...

$ module available

... will display other modules than before.

You now have access to Anaconda3/2020.11.