Common Set of Open Source Utilities

BC Project: FY06-19
Date of Policy: 01 Sep 2006
Last Updated: 16 Apr 2013

Participating centers will provide a core set of open source utilities on all allocated HPC systems and non-storage user-accessible support servers. These will be available from the users default path or available through a module. Although some of these utilities may be available as part of the Computational Science Environment (CSE), each center will provide them as an independent installation.

Development and Build
Name Description
autoconf (GNU) Produces shell scripts to automatically configure software source code packages.
automake (GNU) Generates portable makefiles for use with the make command.
Bison (GNU) Converts a grammar description into a C program to parse that grammar.
Boost C++ Set of libraries that extend the functionality of C++ programming language.
CMake Cross-platform build and test environment.
Source Repository / Revision Control
Name Description
cvs (GNU) Provides a version control system for managing source files and documents.
subversion Provides a version control system for managing source files, and documents. This includes both the svn and svnadmin commands. The svnadmin command supports creating new, modifying and monitoring source repositories.
git Provides a distributed version control system for managing source files and documents. The git tools should be configured to support the bridging of git and svn.

Information on how to use the subversion commands for source code repositories on HPCMP systems is provided in the BC Common Capability Source Code Repositories.

Archive and Compression
Name Description
tar (GNU) Creates tar archives, as well as providing various other kinds of manipulation.
gzip, gunzip (GNU) Data compression/extraction utilities
bzip2, bunzip2 Block-sorting data compression/extraction utilities. Command line options are deliberately similar to those of gzip.
Libraries for Data Models and Formats
Name Description
HDF5 HDF5 is a data model, library, and file format for storing and managing data. It supports an unlimited variety of datatypes, and is designed for flexible and efficient I/O and for high volume and complex data.

Two implementations per installed software version will be provided, each compiled with the default compilers on the system:
  • Serial
  • Parallel with MPI (with '-parallel'). This will be compiled using the default MPI implementation on the system.
NetCDF NetCDF is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data.

Two implementations per installed software version will be provided, each compiled with the default compilers on the system:
  • NetCDF with serial HDF5
  • NetCDF with parallel HDF5 (with '-parallel' suffix)
XDMF (eXtensible Data Model and Format) is a library providing a standard way to access data produced by HPC codes. ParaView, VisIt and EnSight visualization programs are able to read XDMF.

Other software utilities can be incorporated into this core set with Baseline Configuration Team consensus.