Software Install Policy

The LUMI User Support Team (LUST) maintains an infrastructure for automatic and reproducible software installations, based on EasyBuild and Spack. EasyBuild is our preferred choice, which we actively contribute installation scripts to in the LUMI EasyBuild-contrib repository on GitHub. We also provide a pre-configured Spack instance which can install packages from the upstream Spack repository on GitHub. We would like, in the spirit of European HPC collaboration, to encourage users and consortium members to contribute to these software collections and share installation scripts. If you are using an in-house development application or if the software is not available through an installation framework, LUST can collaborate with you and your team during the compilation, installation, and optimization processes.

The main file systems on LUMI are not well suited to handle a large amount (i.e. millions) of small files. We strongly advise against installing certain software packages like Python (Conda) and R directly in the home and/or project directories. The file system quotas will, in general, not be raised to allow this practice. Such software can often be containerized to lessen the load on the parallel file systems. Please consult the Python packages installation guide for an overview of better alternatives.

LUMI operates under a "bring your own license" model for commercial software. Only a small amount of software (mainly development tools) are covered by the LUMI budget. If your organisation has existing software licenses, these licenses can in many cases be used on LUMI by checking out the licenses from the organisation's own license server across the internet when a job starts on a compute node. Please note that there are currently no facilities for running private license servers within LUMI.