This page contains a guide for building and using OpenIFS 48r1 at model version 48R1.1 in a linux based container using Docker.

While this page focuses on the containerised installation, the details presented can be used as a recipe for the underlying dependencies required to install and run OpenIFS 48r1 on a linux system.

Contents:

 

Creation of a docker build directory

The first step is to make a directory from which the OpenIFS container can be created and cd into that directory, e.g.

mkdir <openifs-docker-build-dir>
cd <openifs-docker-build-dir>

Once inside the <openifs-docker-build-dir>  clone or branch from the git repository with the OpenIFS release package, e.g.

git clone --single-branch --branch release ssh://git@git.ecmwf.int/oifs/openifs-48r1.1.git


  • Please note that currently access to this repository is restricted to a limited number of users only.
  • It is important that the OpenIFS package in the docker build directory is a fresh clone/branch, i.e., not built on your local system.

Once OpenIFS 48r1 has been extracted to your <openifs-docker-build-dir> ,  then copy the Dockerfile from the release to <openifs-docker-build-dir> 

cp  <openifs-docker-build-dir>/openifs-48r1.1/scripts/docker/gcc-docker-48r1.1/Dockerfile <openifs-docker-build-dir>/.

This cp step is important because the Dockerfile  and the OpenIFS release, i.e., openifs-48r1.1, need to be in the same directory to build the container (see the openifs-48r1.1/scripts/docker/gcc-docker-48r1.1/Dockerfile)

Build the OpenIFS docker image

The following command builds the docker image

docker build --tag "openifs-48r1.1" .

Note the trailing '.' to build in the current dir, which is required.

This command runs the build process for the OpenIFS image using gcc:11.2.0-bullseye as the base image, which is a debian Linux distribution with gcc 11.2 (at the time of writing, similar to the gcc on the ATOS). After downloading the image, the Dockerfile installs the following software

    apt install -y git && \
    apt install -y cmake && \
    apt install -y python3 python3-ruamel.yaml python3-yaml python3-venv && \
    apt install -y libomp-dev && \
    apt install -y libboost-dev libboost-date-time-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-serialization-dev libboost-program-options-dev&& \
    apt install -y netcdf-bin libnetcdf-dev libnetcdff-dev && \
    apt install -y libatlas-base-dev && \
    apt install -y liblapack-dev && \
    apt install -y libeigen3-dev && \
    apt install -y bison && \ 
    apt install -y flex && \
    apt install -y vim && \
    apt install -y wget bc

Once these packages are installed, open-mpi is downloaded and built, the openifs user is created and the openifs-48r1.1  directory is copied to the image.

On a Macbook pro (M1) the initial build of the container, takes about 5 minutes. If you decide to change the Dockerfile following a build, you can just execute the same command and, depending on what you change, subsequent builds can be a lot quicker. 

  • At the time of writing open-mpi is downloaded and built as part of the image creation. This is quite slow, so in the future we will investigate the use of a standard library
  • If a fresh build is required but an image has already been built, then execute the following command, which is the same as above but with no-cache
docker build --no-cache --tag "openifs-48r1.1" .
  • The tag name does not need to be provided but it is useful for identifying images.