EasyBuild is the easiest and fastest way to install a software for yourself. It creates a module that you can load like the other software available on the cluster. The only requirement is an easyconfig file.

Check out the ULHPC tutorial from our latest HPC school on how to use EasyBuild, and also the official HPC UGent docs.

Additonal sources for easyconfigs

If you don’t find an easyconfig for your software on the cluster with:

$> module load base/EasyBuild
$> eb -S <name>

as described in the tutorial, you can check out the EasyConfigs page. Since we freeze the easybuild versions on the cluster when we deploy a set of software, you might find newer versions or other software there. Of course you can also write your own easyconfig or adjust an existing one. More details about that are also in the tutorial linked above.

If you want to use an easyconfig from hpcugent’s (or any other) github repository, you can follow this procedure:

$> mkdir -p ~/git/hpcugent
$> cd ~/git/hpcugent
$> git clone https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs.git

$> module load base/EasyBuild
$> eb -r ~/git/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/easybuild/easyconfigs gtk+-2.24.28-intel-2015a.eb --try-toolchain ictce,7.3.5

Toolchains

Since we use a different toolchain (set of compilers and common libraries, see the definition) on our clusters than HPC UGent’s default, it’s usually a good idea to add --try-toolchain ictce,7.3.5 to your easybuild call. Otherwise it will try to build the full toolchain, which takes a long time and is likely to fail.

RESIF

RESIF is a tool built on top of EasyBuild to facilitate the installation of sets of software. It is used by the UL HPC Management Team to build the whole software stack on the UL HPC clusters. You should consider using RESIF if you want to install several softwares that are available through EasyBuild.

You can find instructions how to use it in the tutorial from the latest HPC school.