Software

Software Modules

The Lighthouse cluster uses the Lmod modules system to provide access to centrally installed software. If you used a cluster at U-M previously, then you should review the documentation for the module system as we have changed the configuration to match that used at most national clusters and most other university clusters.

In particular, you should use the command module keyword to look for a module and do not use module available to search for software, as module available will only show software for which all the dependencies (or prerequisites) are already loaded.

So, to search for the software package FFTW, use

$ module keyword fftw

That will show which versions are installed and provide a command to determine what is needed to load it.

Please see our page on using the Lmod modules system for more details and examples.

There are two main categories of software available on the system: software that is installed as part of the installation of the operating system and software that is installed separately. No special action is needed to use the software installed with the operating system. The separately installed software is set up so that you will use a module to use it. The module will set up the environment and make the software available. We do it this way to enable having multiple versions of the same package and to avoid having conflicts between software packages that have mutually exclusive system requirements.

Requesting Software Licenses

Many of the software packages that are licensed for use on ARC clusters are licensed for a limited number of concurrent uses. If you will use one of those packages, then you must request a license or licenses in your submission script. As an example, to request one Stata license, you would use

#SBATCH --licenses=stata@slurmdb:1

The list of software can be found from Lighthouse by using the command

$ scontrol show licenses