Research Note #10 - Installing NetCDF on FX10

Got a very good lesson today. I've just realized that the NetCDF package I installed for WRF on FX10 few months ago was in fact version 4.1.3 and not 4.4.1.1. I found that 4.1.3 package from WRF online tutorial web page contains more source codes, not only C but fortran and C++, where 4.4.1.1 downloaded  directly from NetCDF website only has either C or fortran codes. In order to install NetCDF libraries for both C and fortran from the latest packages, one should download and install the NetCDF-C first, then install NetCDF-fortran. It was quite confusing since NetCDF-C package's name doesn't contain "C" on it (just NetCDF).

The followings are the steps to install the latest NetCDF-C (4.4.1.1) and NetCDF-fortran (4.2) on FX10 Oakleaf super computer of University of Tokyo. The compilers used for these installations are cross-compilers of FX10 (frtpx, fccpx and FCCpx) on login node. While some resources I found on internet use quite complicated compiler options and optimizations, I used very basic one instead. So far, I found no problems for the compilations.  

1. Environment variables (bash)

$ export CC=fccpx

$ export CXX=FCCpx

$ export FC=frtpx

$ export F77=frtpx

2. Install NetCDF-C

Because it's cross-compiling, we need to add option "--host" for configure script. For FX10, the host name is "sparc64v-sparc-linux-gnu". For other machine, it should be "x86_64" (just run uname command to make it sure).

./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR/netcdf --disable-dap --disable-netcdf-4 --disable-shared --host=sparc64v-sparc-linux-gnu

make

make install

Since it's cross-compilation, we cannot run "make check" on login mode of FX10. In order to check the installed binaries, we should use Interactive mode of FX10 to run them.

3. Install NetCDF-fortran

This is basically the same with its C counterpart. One of differences is the option for configure script where there are no "--disable-dap" and "--disable-netcdf-4" for fortran version. One important thing for this installation is, we should set CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS on environment variables before running configure script, otherwise the configuration will be failed.

export CPPFLAGS=-I$INSTALL_DIR/netcdf/include

export LDFLAGS=-L$INSTALL_DIR/netcdf/lib

./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR/netcdf --disable-shared --host=sparc64v-sparc-linux-gnu

make

make install

  

After  installation, check the contents of netcdf directory, especially /lib and /include, make sure all libraries are there. Also, don't forget to test "ncdump" on interactive mode to make sure it could be run well.