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Overview

On this page you find information about pre-installed software on LUMI as well as guidance on ways to install additional software yourself. If you are looking for information on how to develop your own software on LUMI, consult the developing section instead.

Please note that LUMI User Support Team can only offer limited help with installing scientific software as is further explained in the Install policy.

Avoid installing a lot of small files

The home and project directories reside on the Lustre based parallel file system on LUMI-P which does not perform well with installations of software containing a lot of small files, e.g. Python or R environments installed via Conda or pip. For such software a container based approach must be used. See the Python packages installation guide for an overview of options for installing Conda/pip environments.

Pre-installed software

On LUMI, we provide some pre-installed software in both central software stacks (managed by the LUMI User Support Team) and local software collections (managed by local organizations in the LUMI consortium):

  • Central LUMI software stacks

    A full overview of software, that is either pre-installed in the LUMI software stacks, or available as a user-installable LUMI-specific build recipe for the EasyBuild package manager, can be found in the LUMI software library. The information, if a software is pre-installed or user-installable, can be found when you open the page of the specific software. For software installed in the central LUMI software stacks, the first channel to get help on a specific module is through the module help command, but the LUMI Software Library pages sometimes contain more information on how to run the software, or more information about specific options that were chosen when installing the software on LUMI. Consult the module environment page for instructions on identifying the pre-installed software on LUMI through the module system instead. Read more about the user-installable software with EasyBuild in the next section.

  • Software collections by local organizations

    There is also pre-installed software available provided by local LUMI consortium organizations. These software collections are available for all LUMI users, but are updated and supported by the local LUMI consortium organizations themselves, not by the LUMI User Support Team.

Installing additional software

We offer two package management systems to install software on LUMI, with varying levels of support:

  • EasyBuild:

    EasyBuild is the primary software installation tool on LUMI. It is used to install most software in the central software stack on LUMI, but it is also extremely easy to install additional software in your personal or project space and have it integrate fully with the software stacks.

    An overview of (almost) all software that we provide pre-installed in the central software stack or for which we provide ready-to-use EasyBuild build recipes for a user installation can be found in the LUMI Software Library.

  • Spack

    Spack is another popular package manager to install software mostly from sources for optimal performance on HPC systems. We provide a Spack configuration that is configured to use of the compilers available on LUMI and which can install packages in the upstream Spack repository. However, we do no package development ourselves in Spack.

The preferred location for software installations is your /project directory, so that a software installation can be shared with all users in your project. Software can be installed in your home directory also but it is not recommended and you will not get additional quota for it. Creating permanent software installations in your /scratch or /flash directories is not recommended as these will be cleaned automatically in the future when the file system starts to fill up.

If you intend to install Python packages, please consult the Python packages installation guide for an overview of your options.

Alternatives to installing software yourself

As alternatives to installing software, you may: