Using TOAST at NERSC¶

A recent version of TOAST is already installed at NERSC, along with all necessary dependencies. You can use this installation directly, or use it as the basis for your own development.

Module Files¶

To get access to the needed module files, add the machine-specific module file location to your search path:

module use /global/common/software/cmb/${NERSC_HOST}/default/modulefiles

The default part of this path is a symlink to the latest stable installation. There are usually several older versions kept here as well.

You can safely put the above line in your ~/.bashrc.ext inside the section for cori. It does not actually load anything into your environment.

Loading the Software¶

To load the software do the following:

module load cmbenv
source cmbenv

Note that the “source” command above is not “reversible” like normal module operations. This is required in order to activate the underlying conda environment. After running the above commands, TOAST and many other common software tools will be in your environment, including a Python3 stack.

Installing TOAST (Optional)¶

The cmbenv stack contains a recent version of TOAST, but if you want to build your own copy then you can use the cmbenv stack as a starting point. Here are the steps:

Decide on the installation location. You should install software either to one of the project software spaces in /global/common/software or in your home directory. If you plan on using this installation for large parallel jobs, you should install to /global/common/software.
Load the cmbenv stack.
Go into your git checkout of TOAST and make a build directory:
```
cd toast
mkdir build
cd build
```

Use the cori-intel platform file to build TOAST and install:

../platforms/cori-intel.sh \
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/somewhere
make -j 4 install

Set up a shell function in ~/.bashrc.ext to load this into your environment search paths before the cmbenv stack:

load_toast () {
    dir=/path/to/your/install
    export PATH="${dir}/bin:${PATH}"
    pysite=$(python3 --version 2>&1 | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e "s#\(.*\)\.\(.*\)\..*#\1.\2#")
    export PYTHONPATH="${dir}/lib/python${pysite}/site-packages:${PYTHONPATH}"
}

Now whenever you want to override the cmbenv TOAST installation you can just do:

load_toast