If you are using software that is primarily distributed as source code or if you need to compile your software, this page provides some tips and guidelines for doing so.
When an application is statically compiled, the majority of the libraries that the application uses is compiled and packaged with the application binaries. This signficantly reduces the things that the application depends on, allowing the application to run on a much larger proportion of systems.
You can compile code using gcc using the -static flag when compiling. If you
are building an application that uses configure, then using the
--enable-static option should create a statically linked application.
Otherwise, setting LD_FLAGS in the environment to --enable-static
(e.g. export LD_FLAGS="--enable-static") make generate statically linked
binaries.
GCC and ld dynamically link applications by default so you probably will not need to do anything special to create a dynamically linked application. However, you should read the following sections in order to generate binaries that will function correctly.
Regardless of whether you statically or dynamically compile your application,
you should compile your application on login.osgconnect.net. This will ensure
that your application is built on an environment that is similar to the majority
of the compute nodes on OSG. In addition, you will need to add the following
require to your HTCondor submit file: (OpSysAndVer =?= "SL6") || (OpSysAndVer =?= "RHEL6") || (OpSysAndVer =?= "Centos6") to make sure that your binaries run
systems that have compatible linux distributions.
By default, applications will be built using gcc 4.4.7 when compiled on
login.osgconnect.net. If you use this compiler, you will not have to make any
compiler related changes to your job script.
Alternatively, if you need to use a more recent version of gcc, there are
several versions available using the distributed environment modules. In order
to use these versions of gcc, you just need to load the appropriate module (e.g.
module load gcc/4.9.2). After doing this, you can build your application as
you normally do. The version of gcc that you loaded should automatically be
selected. However, if you do this, you will also need to change your job script
to load the appropriate gcc module before running your application.
The distributed environment modules system provides several commonly used
scientific libraries (lapack, atlas, hdf5, netcdf, etc.) that your application
may need to link to. In order to link against a library provided by the
module system, just load the appropriate module (e.g. hdf5/1.8.12). Doing so
will set the CPATH and LIBRARY_PATH so that gcc will be able to find the
includes and link files for that library. If your build system does not pick up
the appropriate you can look at the CPATH and LIBRARY_PATH variables to find
the paths used and incorporate that into your build process or you can contact
user support for assistance.
Finally, if you do use modules from the modules system, you will need to modify your job scripts to load the appropriate modules before running you application.
If you have questions or need assistance, please contact [email protected].