Question: Do Orion and Hercules now share the same spack-stack installation?

[guoqing-noaa]

Previously, Orion and Hercules use spack-stack at different install locations.

Now, per the spack-stack documentation:
https://spack-stack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/PreConfiguredSites.html#pre-configured-sites-tier-1

they share the same spack-stack installation, right?

If yes, why Hercules has an additional GCC support while Orion does not?
Thanks!

[rickgrubin-noaa]

On hosts hercules and orion, the install location for spack-stack shares an identical pathname, but not an identical physical location:

hercules

% df -h
[...]
hercules-nfs.hpc.msstate.edu:/apps-linux/hercules/rh-9.1/x86_64                     9.1T  2.3T  6.9T  25% /apps

orion

% df -h
[...]
orion-nfs.hpc.msstate.edu:/apps-linux/orion/rh-9.1/x86_64                           7.3T  3.9T  3.5T  53% /apps

That there is no gcc-based stack installation on orion is an artifact from a time when hercules and orion were quite different machines (as opposed to today, where they're far more similar). gcc-based stacks existed on hercules and other hosts, and a decision was made to not build one on orion.

There are no plans to build a gcc-based v1.9 stack on orion at this time.

[guoqing-noaa]

@rickgrubin-noaa Thanks a lot for the information.

From the user point of view, since no differences in the path, when we create a module file for Orion to use spack-stack 1.9.x, we can safely copy it over for Hercules (and vice versa), right? Thanks!

[rickgrubin-noaa]

@rickgrubin-noaa Thanks a lot for the information.

From the user point of view, since no differences in the path, when we create a module file for Orion to use spack-stack 1.9.x, we can safely copy it over for Hercules (and vice versa), right? Thanks!

Maybe; haven't tried it, and while I understand the question, without more context, it's hard to answer.

That said, consider the following for MPI-enabled packages and their modulefiles:

orion
/apps/contrib/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.9.3/envs/ue-oneapi-2024.2.1/install/modulefiles/intel-oneapi-mpi/2021.13-li242lf

hercules
/apps/contrib/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.9.3/envs/ue-oneapi-2024.2.1/install/modulefiles/intel-oneapi-mpi/2021.13-sqiixt7

Pathnames look the same to a point, but are certainly not identical. Further, different versions of gcc were used on both hosts when building envs, so that's another likely tripping point.

It would be interesting to see what happens if you were try to create modulefiles with identical pathing and try to utilize them on both hosts; if you do, please report results.

[guoqing-noaa]

@rickgrubin-noaa Thanks for more discussions!
This is my orion.intel.lua file:

prepend_path("MODULEPATH", "/apps/contrib/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.9.3/envs/ue-oneapi-2024.2.1/install/modulefiles/Core")

load("stack-oneapi/2024.2.1")
load("stack-intel-oneapi-mpi/2021.13")
load("cmake/3.27.9")
load("parallel-netcdf/1.12.3")
load("parallelio/2.6.2")
load("jasper/2.0.32")
load("libpng/1.6.37")

When I tried to create one for Hercules and I found they are the same in the lua file level.

[rickgrubin-noaa]

@rickgrubin-noaa Thanks for more discussions! This is my orion.intel.lua file:

prepend_path("MODULEPATH", "/apps/contrib/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.9.3/envs/ue-oneapi-2024.2.1/install/modulefiles/Core")

load("stack-oneapi/2024.2.1")
load("stack-intel-oneapi-mpi/2021.13")
load("cmake/3.27.9")
load("parallel-netcdf/1.12.3")
load("parallelio/2.6.2")
load("jasper/2.0.32")
load("libpng/1.6.37")

When I tried to create one for Hercules and I found they are the same in the lua file level.

At that level, it may work.

As before, give it a try and show the results here.

[guoqing-noaa]

@rickgrubin-noaa It works for me, :)
I was trying to understand whether they are the same installation.
Thanks for clarification that although they use the same path but they are different installations.