Software on Pawsey computers includes vendor-supplied operating systems, compiler suites, numerical libraries and research-domain-specific packages.The software stack of Setonix is organised on three levels, all residing under the /software filesystem.
- The system-wide level is accessible by all users of the supercomputer and is maintained by the Pawsey staff.
- The project-wide level is the set of applications and libraries accessible by all members of a project. Each project is provided with a dedicated directory on the
/softwarefilesystem. The path is/software/projects/<project-id>. Project members are responsible for managing their installations. - Each user also has a dedicated directory in which to install personal software. The path is
/software/projects/<project-id>/<user-name>
Module systems are available on our HPC systems to help manage software and keep the shell environment as tidy and reproducible as possible. In particular, Setonix and Topaz adopt Lmod. For instance, the command
$ module load gromacs/2021.4
would load the required variables to run the molecular dynamics software Gromacs.
Container technology is emerging in HPC as an alternative effective tool for building, managing and running software. Singularity is the container engine currently installed on all Pawsey Supercomputing systems. On Setonix and Topaz, Singularity can be loaded as a module using the syntax
$ module load singularity/3.8.6
Among other features, Singularity is fully compatible with the Docker engine and Docker containers. Singularity can be run on Nimbus cloud as well as on personal computers and workstations.
A listing of the packages that are installed on Pawsey machines is available. Dedicated pages with additional details are available for the most popular applications within our user base.