The following notes describe the porting of suites for use with the Cylc 7 environment on ARE VDI as described by Cylc 7 setup for ARE without MOSRS.

In the usual case, rather than creating a suite or source code from scratch, you will be porting it from (e.g.) the ACCESS project. These suites, source codes and their test suites might be configured to run in their original environments but might not run correctly from ARE VDI until you make changes to both the suites and their environments. This page lists of some of the changes you may need to make.

Reviewing filesystem visibility from ARE

ARE VDI has the same home directory as Gadi login, but can only see the /scratch and /g/data directories that you declared on the ARE VDI Desktop request form.

Updating the PBS storage directives

PBS jobs expect the declaration of directories in the '-l storage' directive to the enable the access to those directories. The minimum directive required for use with Cylc 7 is gdata/hr22+scratch/$PROJECT. Here $PROJECT is your NCI project code set in $HOME/.config/gadi-login.conf or $HOME/.rashrc or both.

  • You must include gdata/hr22 because the rose, cylc and fcm executables used by the cylc7/default module are located under /g/data/hr22.
  • You must include scratch/$PROJECT because the root-dir for rose suite-run that is configured by the cylc7/default module is /scratch/$PROJECT/$USER.
  • Your suite may already use modules or data from the access, hh5 or other projects, and include  gdata/access, gdata/hh5 or other file systems within the '-l storage' directive. Just keep these.

For example, if PROJECT=dx2:

#PBS -l storage=scratch/dx2+gdata/access+gdata/hr22

If you are migrating  your source code or suite from elsewhere, e.g. accessdev, you may need to copy some files to /g/data. You may also need to obtain files via Subversion or possibly via Git.

Setting up FCM keywords

The hr22 FCM environment includes a default FCM keyword.cfg file that contains

include = $FCM_CONF/mosrs/keyword.cfg
include = $FCM_CONF/nemo/keyword.cfg
include = $FCM_CONF/access/keyword.cfg

The environment variable FCM_CONF is defined by the cylc7/default module. The FCM keyword file $FCM_CONF/mosrs/keyword.cfg uses the ki32 MOSRS mirrors. The FCM keyword file $FCM_CONF/nemo/keyword.cfg uses the ki32 NEMO mirror. The FCM keyword file $FCM_CONF/access/keyword.cfg uses the access-svn mirror  file:///g/data/access/access-svn/.

If you want to use different FCM keywords,  you need to define them in $HOME/.metomi/fcm/keyword.cfg You can copy or link these from existing places, but may need to add to or alter some of the keywords.

Using Python environments

Suite tasks that use Python environments enabled by access or hh5  modules should continue to work when run from ARE VDI, as long as your storage directives contain gdata/access or gdata/hh5 respectively.

Please contact NCI if your suite encounters any difficulties in using Python environments. 


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