This is an old revision of the document!
Installing LOFAR Software on a CentOS 6.5 (Final) system (cluster Newton of the AIP Potsdam)
— Frank Breitling 2015/06/26 18:47
I was mainly following the previous installation notes provided by others:
http://www.lofar.org/operations/doku.php?id=public:user_software:lofar
http://www.lofar.org/operations/doku.php?id=public:user_software:ubuntu_12_4
However a few problems occured and had to be solved as described below.
Ideas and support by Arno Schoenmakers, Ger van Diepen and Marcel Loose were very helpful and highly appreciated.
1. Setup of the environment
The following packages are already provided on the cluster:
- BLAS
- LAPACK
- Boost 1.41.0
- cfitsio 3.240
- HDF5
- OpenMP
The cluster also provides a module system to load newer versions of the installed software.
We will activate it and replace the default version of gcc 4.4.7 with gcc 4.8.3 for C++11 support.
1.1 Pathes
This instruction will install all packages in $HOME/local/.
And for the installation of Pyrap (python-casacore) we need a Python path with write access.
So I added the following lines to $HOME/.bashrc:
export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/local/lib64/python2.6/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH export PATH=$HOME/local:$PATH source /usr/share/Modules/init/sh # activate the module system module load gcc # use gcc 4.8.3 (instead of 4.4.7) for C++11 support
1.2 CMake
The 4 Newton head nodes provide CMake 2.6 by default, but the LOFAR Software requires at least 2.6.6. A sufficiently recent version of CMake 3.0.0 is provided via Environment Modules (see also http://modules.sourceforge.net/).
The environment modules also provide more recent HDF5 libraries. Both could be loaded by adding module load cmake hdf5
to $HOME/.bashrc.
But unfortunately the CMake 3.0.0 loaded on the head node newl1 is broken. Furthermore loading the HDF5 libs has no effect on the libs found by CMake, which are still the system's default. So we don't load any module and don't add this line to the .bashrc. Instead we build our own CMake as follows:
mkdir -p $HOME/local/src cd $HOME/local/src wget http://www.cmake.org/files/v3.2/cmake-3.2.3.tar.gz tar xf cmake-3.2.3.tar.gz cd cmake-3.2.3 .bootstrap --prefix $HOME/local make -j12 make install
2. Installation of required packages
Next we need to build and install these other packages as follows:
cd $HOME/local/src/ wget ftp://ftp.atnf.csiro.au/pub/software/wcslib/wcslib.tar.bz2 tar xf packages/wcslib.tar.bz2 cd wcslib-5.6/ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/ make install cd $HOME/local/src/ wget http://www.fftw.org/fftw-3.3.4.tar.gz cd fftw-3.3.4 configure --prefix=$HOME/local --enable-threads --enable-shared --enable-float make -j12 install
3. Installation the LOFAR software
Now we can continue building the LOFAR software.
3.1 Essential CMake switches
We will need these essential CMake switches:
1. -DUSE_OPENMP=YES 2. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$HOME/local 3. -DBoost_NO_BOOST_CMAKE=YES 4. -DENABLE_TABLELOCKING=NO (only for Casacore) 5. -DUSE_LOG4CPLUS=NO (only for the LOFAR packages) 6. -DUSE_BACKTRACE=NO
1.) OpenMP makes use of multi-core CPUs. We want to use this since it speeds up our processing.
2.) Sets the installation path to $HOME/local/.
3.) Is necessary when using some older versions of boost with cmake-2.8.6-rc2 or later, where the boost finding has changed.
(See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9948375/cmake-find-package-succeeds-but-returns-wrong-path.)
Otherwise make will show this error later:
make[2]: *** No rule to make target `/usr/lib64/lib64/libboost_program_options-mt.so.5', needed by `segment'. Stop. make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/segment.dir/all] Error 2 make: *** [all] Error 2
4.) On the AIP Lustre file system Casacore cannot acquire read locks leading to errors like:
msoverview: Version 20110407GvD 2015-06-30 19:32:19 INFO Process 13592: waiting for read-lock on file /lustre/fkbreitl/data/L206894/L206894.cal/L206894_SAP000_SB200_uv.MS.dppp_00001~00040/table.lock Error: Error (Function not implemented) when acquiring lock on /lustre/fkbreitl/data/L206894/L206894.cal/L206894_SAP000_SB200_uv.MS.dppp_00001~00040/table.lock
With table locking switched off these errors are avoided. For practical work there is no disadvantage in disabling table locking.
This switch is only needed for Casacore!
5.) Is necessary for the LOFAR packages if the Log4cplus libs are not installed.
6.) Is necessary if building shared libraries (the default with LOFAR), but libiberty.so is not installed on your system, only libiberty.a.
(See https://support.astron.nl/lofar_issuetracker/issues/8046).
So we can build the rest of the packages as follows.
3.2 Casacore
Casacore also requires the CASA data. This is for example provided with CASA.
Here we assume CASA is already installed and $HOME/local/casa is a link to the CASA folder. Then the data is in $HOME/local/casa.
We will specify this via -DDATA_DIR, otherwise we need a ~/.casarc file with the line: measures.directory: $HOME/local/casa/data
.
cd ~local/src/ git clone https://github.com/casacore/casacore mkdir build/casacore cd build/casacore time cmake -DBUILD_PYTHON=YES -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/local -DUSE_FFTW3=YES -DENABLE_TABLELOCKING=NO \ -DUSE_OPENMP=YES -DDATA_DIR=~/local/casa/data -DUSE_HDF5=YES -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$HOME/local ../../casacore time make -j16 make install
3.3 Pyrap
cd ~/local/src/ git clone https://github.com/casacore/python-casacore.git cd python-casacore python setup.py build_ext -I/usr/include/cfitsio:$HOME/local/include -L$HOME/local/lib python setup.py install --prefix=$HOME/local
3.3.1 Alternative Pyrap installation
Alternatively we can install Pyrap with pip if we install pip before:
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py python get-pip.py --user ~/.local/bin/pip install python-casacore --global-option=build_ext --global-option=-I/usr/include/cfitsio:$HOME/local/include \ --global-option=-L$HOME/local/lib --install-option=--prefix=$HOME/local
3.4 Casarest
Now we continue with the rest:
cd ~/local/src/ svn co https://svn.astron.nl/casarest/trunk/casarest mkdir build/casarest cd build/casarest cmake -DCASACORE_ROOT_DIR=$HOME/local -DBUILD_ALL=1 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$HOME/local \ -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/include/cfitsio -DBoost_NO_BOOST_CMAKE=YES ../../casarest time make -j16 make install
3.5 AOFlagger
Since LOFAR Offline release 2.15.0 also an installation of the AOFlagger is required.
A download link and installation instructions are given at https://sourceforge.net/p/aoflagger/wiki/installation_instructions/
and http://www.lofar.org/wiki/doku.php?id=public:offline_release_2_15_0
cd ~local/src/ tar xf aoflagger-2.7.1.tar.bz2 mkdir aoflagger-2.7.1/build/ cd aoflagger-2.7.1/build/ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$HOME/local -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=YES ../ time make -j 16 make install
3.6 The LOFAR packages
Finally we can build the LOFAR packages. We can chose between a release or the latest version in trunk/ by commenting in and out the corresponding RELEASE lines.
An overview of available releases is given at http://www.lofar.org/operations/doku.php?id=public:lofar_offline_releases .
cd ~local/src/ RELEASE=LOFAR-Release-2_16 && svn checkout --ignore-externals -N https://svn.astron.nl/LOFAR/branches/$RELEASE #RELEASE=LOFAR && svn checkout --ignore-externals -N https://svn.astron.nl/LOFAR/trunk $RELEASE svn update $RELEASE/CMake mkdir -p build/gnu_opt cd build/gnu_opt time cmake -DCASACORE_ROOT_DIR=$HOME/local -DBUILD_PACKAGES="DP3 Calibration" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$HOME/local \ -DUSE_OPENMP=YES -DUSE_LOG4CPLUS=NO -DUSE_BACKTRACE=NO -DBoost_NO_BOOST_CMAKE=YES ../../$RELEASE time make -j16 make install
Done!
Now the commands NDPPP
and calibrate-stand-alone
should be available on this system.
Enjoy!