Installing software in your home directory: Difference between revisions

Most academic software is freely available on the internet. You can email Alliance [mailto:support@tech.alliancecan.ca support] staff, provide them with a URL, and ask them to install any such package so that you and other users will be able access it via a [[Using modules|module load]] command. If the license terms and technical requirements are met they will make it available, typically in one or two business days.

Loading a library [[Using modules | module]] will set environment variables <tt>CPATH</tt> and <tt>LIBRARY_PATH</tt> pointing to the location of the library itself and its header files. These environment variables are supported by most compilers (for example [https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/522775 Intel] and [https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Environment-Variables.html GCC]), which will automatically try the directories listed in those environment variables during compilation and linking phases. This feature allows you you to easily link against the library without specifying its location explicitly by passing the <tt>-I</tt> and <tt>-L</tt> options to the compiler. If your make- or config- file calls for an explicit location of the library to pass to the compiler via <tt>-I</tt> and <tt>-L</tt>, you can usually omit the location of the library and leave these lines blank in the make- or config- file.

Almost all software that is used on the new clusters is distributed centrally, using the CVMFS file system. What this means in practise is that this software is not installed under <code>/usr/bin</code>, <code>/usr/include</code>, and so on, as it would be in a typical Linux distribution, but instead somewhere under <code>/cvmfs/soft.computecanada.ca</code>, and is identical on all new clusters.