Building Firedrake on Isambard

This build process describes how to install Firedrake on Isambard XCI (the ARM part of the system). Instructions for connecting to XCI can be found at https://gw4-isambard.github.io/docs/user-guide/connecting.html.

The build process will work better if you upload your Isambard public SSH key to GitHub (see https://help.github.com/articles/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/ for how to do this). You can build Firedrake without uploading an SSH key but you will see some warnings during the build processes.

The build process is set out in detail in the following steps:

1. Make a new directory on Isambard to use for building Firedrake. This can be called anything you like but for the purposes of these instructions we will assume the directory is ${HOME}/firedrake:

  cd ~
  mkdir firedrake
  cd firedrake

2. Clone this repository and create links to the scripts:

   git clone git@github.com:firedrakeproject/isambard.git
   ln -s isambard/*.sh .

3. Submit a job to the queue to build Firedrake :

   qsub submit_build.sh

Firedrake will not build on a log in node so has to run via the batch queue (you can run the build script using an interactive job if you prefer).

Additional arguments to firedrake-install can be passed to the install_firedrake_isambard.sh script by editing submit_build.sh.

You will need a job script to submit a job to the queue, which can be based on the example submit_firedrake_isambard.sh. You will need to edit the script to specify the location of your Firedrake build and the name of the Python script you want to run.