Getting ready - looking for advice

[miche1@earthlink_net]

I'm getting ready to try installing CESM on my HPC workstation and am looking for recommendations on how to proceed. I've always used openSUSE on my clusters, just because it's what I'm familiar with. But I've often thought that Debian (or some derivative of it, like Mint-DE) is more "accepted" by the climate community. I know that porting CESM is a big job, and I'm hoping that by choosing my Linux distro I can make life easier on myself (I'm a scientist, not a sysop - but I have to do my own sysoping).

Does anyone very knowledgeable have recommendations on what (preferably Linux) OS would be easiest to port CESM to? Also, would a certain compiler make the job easier?

Thank You Very Much!!
Patti

 

[jedwards]

Hi Patti,CESM runs on a number of linux distrubutions, I don't think  that we've found any to be particularly better or worse than others.  We also support a number of compilers,our current favorite is intel.       

 

[miche1@earthlink_net]

Hi J - thanks for the intel (hah!) - I guess I can try downloading the intel compiler.  I was hoping to stick with gfortran if possible because everything (like OpenMPI - my current favorite) is already compiled with gfortran in all the Linux distros I've looked at.  So, basically, you're saying I have to compile intel versions of all libraries (like netcdf, openmpi, etc.)?
Sorry to be dense!  But thanks!EDIT:  I forgot - is there a recent "newbies" porting guide you can point me toward?  I found a couple but they are old and didn't seem to work the last time I tried CESM (or else I'm just having troubles with them).

 

[jedwards]

Here is the users guide, it should be up to date, if there is something incorrect in it please let us know.http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/cesm1.2/cesm/doc/usersguide/book1.html
You might be able to link mpi and netcdf libriaries built with gnu to CESM built with intel - it should work but I haven't tried it myself.  We are working on getting CESM fully compatable with the gnu compiler suite but we aren't there yet.   Currently everything will compile with recent versions of gfortran and some of the compsets will run correctly but others get runtime errors... 

 

[miche1@earthlink_net]

I thought I'd ask - is there a list of these known-friendly distros?"CESM runs on a number of linux distrubutions,"

 

[santos]

I don't think that the choice of Linux distribution is really a significant factor in most cases. Some software has to be installed outside of a distribution's package system, so it doesn't matter what the distribution is (e.g. the Intel compiler, and any libraries built with it). Other software is so consistent that pretty much any distribution has a working version (e.g. tcsh).I would say that the only considerations are these:

• If you have fancy hardware, make sure that the distribution has a Linux kernel that's compatible with the drivers you need.
• Even though the gcc port is still a bit incomplete, if you still really want to use the gcc/gfortran that comes with the distribution, you want a distribution that updates software pretty often, so that it has at least gcc 4.7 as the compiler. Some distributions, such as those based on RHEL, still have fairly old compilers, with much weaker Fortran language support. Almost any distribution with a more frequent release cycle should work, though.