/SW Structure

Scientific software packages not provided by the vendor of the operating system are served by a central server and always available through the directory /sw, which is a link to /opt/cen/sw. The command “df −h /sw” shows the filesystem (nfs4.isi.cen.uni-hamburg.de:/ifs/cen/sw) serving the /opt/cen/sw mount.

A consistent naming scheme for each package installation directory is used. The general form is /sw/<os-name>/<package-name>-<package-version>-<special-feature>-<compiler>

where

• <os-name> is the operating system name (“buster-x64”, “centos7-x64”, etc);
• <package-name> is the software package name;
• <package-version> is the software package version;
• <special-feature>, if present, might be:
  • “precompiled”, if the installation was not performed from source code;
  • “static”, if the installation does not contain shared libraries;
  • “openmpi”, to indicate the message passing interface (MPI) implementation the package has been linked against;
• <compiler>, if present, indicates that the package can only be used with a certain compiler (e.g., “gcc??” or “intel??”) and reflects the compiler used during installation.

Static versions of central software packages are installed in order for the user to avoid problems arising from the usage of libraries that are not on the linker’s path. For some packages, shared versions are also available.