Modules

Introduction

Setting and maintaining your environment while running a large number of diverse software applications with different requirements can be a daunting task. The Research Computing is adopting the modules system developed by Robert McLay at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in order to ease the complexity of this process and relieve users of this burden.

Basic usage

See Modules Basic Usage for a short practical introduction to using modules.

Module Command

There is no executable called 'module' in Lmod. The 'module' command or its 'ml' alias, which you can use interactively are enabled when you source /etc/profile.d/modules.sh shell script inside another script or shell environment. It's done automatically for interactive sessions, but if you need access to 'module load' in a script running in a scheduled job source the above script first. Support for other shells and programming languages like python or R is also available (“sh”, “csh”, “perl”, “python”, “lisp”, “fish”, “cmake”, or “r”). See documentation for details.

Personal modules

You can write and use your own modulefiles. The procedure for making them available is very simple. For example, if you'd like to create version 1.0 of the module 'mymod' pick any directory you own, say ~/modules:

• Create a personal module directory, and a 'mymod' module directory

mkdir ~/modules
mkdir ~/modules/mymod

• Add a modulefile

touch ~/modules/mymod/1.0.lua

Note that you can copy any modulefile we have in /apps/lmod/modulefiles to serve as a starting point for your 'mymod/1.0.lua' modulefile.
To test/use the new module run the following command, or add it to your ~/.bashrc file:

module use ~/modules

The "myapp/1.0" module should be available for your use.

Loading modules with Python

If you need to load an environment module from python set the sys.path to the Lmod installation on HPG. E.g.

import os, sys
sys.path.insert(0,"/apps/lmod/lmod/init/")
from env_modules_python import module
module("load","somemodule/version")

Support

To request help with using modules or installation of new module enabled application please file a support request.

Upstream Documentation

Those who would like to learn as much as possible about lmod can use this documentation.

There is a well-written article on Lmod in the HPC Admin Magazine.