Applications
We provide a wide range of centrally installed commercial and open source applications and libraries to our cluster users.
Central installations
Applications and libraries that are used by many people from different departments of ETH (e.g. MATLAB, Comsol, Ansys, etc.) or that are explicitly requested by a shareholder group will be installed centrally in /cluster/apps. Providing a software stack of centrally installed applications and libraries gives the users certain advantages.
- Applications and libraries are visible and accessible to all users via environment modules.
- They are maintained by the HPC group (or in a few cases also by users).
- Commercial licenses are provided by the central license administration of ETH (IT shop).
If an application or library is only used by a few people, then we recommend the users to install it locally in their home directory. In case you need help to install an application or library locally, please do not hesitate to contact cluster support.
Software stacks
On our clusters we provide multiple software stacks.
After the login, no modules are loaded and the user first needs to load a stack to access the available software. We recommend to use the most recent stack:
module load stack/2024-06
LMOD Modules use a hierarchy of modules with three layers to avoid conflicts when multiple modules are loaded at the same time.
- The core layer contains software which are independent of compilers and MPI libraries, e.g., commercials software which come with their own runtime libraries
$ module load comsol/6.2
- The compiler layer contains software which are dependent of compilers.
$ module load gcc/12.2.0 hdf5/1.14.3
- The MPI layer contains software which are dependent of compilers and MPI libraries
$ module load gcc/12.2.0 openmpi/4.1.6 hdf5/1.14.3
