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Running a cluster software stack on Windows

Codes that only use standard C/C++ or Fortran will likely compile directly on Windows. the most popular commercial compiler on Windows for C and C++ does however offer very little support for, e.g., OpenMP, an often used technology for shared memory computing. The Intel compilers may offer a solution here.

One step up is using CygWin. You can then use the GNU compilers and a large fraction of the POSIX system calls will also be supported. This will already support a larger range of applications.

However, as WSL 2 is free this is the better technology to create a cluster-like environment on Linux. As this technology even enables running practically any Linux binary, many options are available to install scientific software. However, as the cores are shared with Windows, just don't expect that it will be a very noise-free platform to also benchmark software, and some software may suffer.

System managers on HPC clusters often prefer to install software from sources to extract all performance out of a specific CPU, rather than using binaries compiled for a generic processor. Systems as Conda are less suited for that (though conda does offer some critical libraries with multiple code paths for different CPUs). We will describe three options.

  • EESSI is an effort to build a software stack that is served via a web based file system. It provides binaries for several platforms. Though the most optimal binary for your PC may not be there (as in particular Intel disables features in cores of the PC variants of processors compared to the ones they sell for HPC systems), it will often be able to offer a binary that is close to optimal.

  • EasyBuild is a software framework for installations of scientific software and is also used in the EESSI project. It can help you to do optimised installs from source for a lot of software.

  • Spack is another such framework with a very different filosophy but it also installs most software from sources and is probably the most used of such frameworks.

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