PyModules is an alternative implementation of the Environment Modules system for managing software environments on research computing clusters. It provides several new features:

• Uses simple, INI-style configuration files that share common values across multiple versions of a package.
• Module configuations are cached in a SQLite database, and editing/publishing are separate actions.
• Modules can be categorized. The module avail command lists by category or by fulltext search on the package name or version.
• Modules can be localized by CPU architecture, for either a specific vendor (AMD vs. Intel), SSE instruction set, or CPU model identifier.
• New module bin command lists all binaries provided by a module.

PyModules is developed by the Center for Computation and Visualization at Brown University, and distributed freely for academic use under a non-commercial license (see the LICENSE file for full details).

Installation

Zip archives are available from the downloads page, or you can clone the Bitbucket repo for the latest development version.

For installation instructions, see the INSTALL file.

Documentation

See http://ccv.brown.edu/mhowison/pymodules

Citing

Howison M, Shen A, Loomis A. 2013. Building Software Environments for Research Computing Clusters. In Proceedings of the 27th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA '13), Washington, DC, USA. https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/building-software-environments-research-computing-clusters

Issues

Please report any issues using the issue tracker at Bitbucket:

https://bitbucket.org/mhowison/pymodules/issues

Authors

Mark Howison
Andy Loomis
Aaron Shen