Software updates on CHPC Linux machines including clusters

Date Posted: May 17th, 2017

• IDL - updated to version 8.6, what's new is at https://www.harrisgeospatial.com/docs/WhatsNew.html
• Matlab - updated to version R2017a, what's new is at https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/whatsnew.html
• Lumerical FDTD - updated to version 2017a a.k.a. 8.17, new features arelisted at https://kb.lumerical.com/en/new_features_layout_2017a.html, we notice about 20% performance improvement in our test.
• Intel software development stack, including the compilers, MKL, MPI, and profilers - updated to version 2017.4 - this is a minor feature update that should not require recompilation of any existing codes built with 2017.0 - release notes are at https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-parallel-studio-xe-release-notes
• PGI compilers and tools - updated to version 17.4 - as with Intel, the update should not affect existing executables. Release notes are at https://www.pgroup.com/support/new_rel.htm
• We have also implemented some module name shortcuts, which users can customize themselves, as described at https://www.chpc.utah.edu/documentation/software/modules.php#ccm. We have pre-defined some module shortcuts and aliases, which can be seen by running "module avail":
  ...
     intel/2017.4.196            (17:17.4)
  ...
  This means that we can load the intel module by "module load intel/17", or "intel/17.4", rather than using longer version. We also defined an alias "python2" for "python/2.7.11", although this does not show in the "module avail" or "module spider" now, hopefully it will once we update LMod.