Software Overview

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At Courant, we try to maintain relatively up-to-date versions of a wide variety of software, each with as much documentation as possible. Because of the differing demands of the various packages, it is sometimes difficult to determine what software is installed, where it is located, and what documentation (if any) is available for it.

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Binary and Licensed Software (Linux/Solaris)

Many third party binary and licensed software packages are installed in:

• /opt/*

Documentation for these packages are generally under their respective directory.

You can also see a list of purchased software and instructions.

 

Special Purpose Software (Linux/Solaris)

Some packages have idiosyncracies that make it inappropriate to install them together with others. These packages are installed in:

• /usr/local/pkg/*

Documentation for these packages are generally under their respective directory.

 

The Module System

The module system is available on our CentOS systems. The module system allows one to easily prepare a shell environment to use a specific program which may require the setting of environment variables in order to function properly.

If you source the CIMS default shell rc file in your shell rc file, you will end up with an environment variable called MODULEPATH, which will include /usr/local/etc/modulefiles.  This is where we store our module files.  A module file can be viewed as any text file to see what it does exactly.

For example, we offer a newer version of gcc than what comes with CentOS 7: gcc version 4.9.2.  In order to successfully use this version of gcc, some environmental variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH and INCLUDE_PATH must be modified to look at gcc 4.9.2's files.  One could modify these variables manually, write a script to set them, or simply loading the module will do the trick:

 user123@box999[~]$ which gcc
 /usr/bin/gcc
 user123@box999[~]$ echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH
 
 user123@box999[~]$ echo $INCLUDE_PATH
 
 user123@box999[~]$ module load gcc-4.9
 user123@box999[~]$ which gcc
 /usr/local/stow/gcc-4.9.2/bin/gcc
 user123@box999[~]$ echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH
 /usr/local/stow/gcc-4.9.2/lib64
 user123@box999[~]$ echo $INCLUDE_PATH
 /usr/local/stow/gcc-4.9.2/include 

 

Table of Helpful Module Commands

Command	Effect
module avail	List all available modules.  Will not work if environment variable MODULEPATH does not include /usr/local/etc/modulefiles
module load module_name	Load a specific module
module unload module_name	Unload a specific module
echo $LOADEDMODULES	List modules which you currently have loaded

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Please see the Software FAQ.