SWAN Wave Model Container with MPI

Coinciding with the Containers at TACC training taking place today via webinar, here is a method I have used successfully to build our version of SWAN v41.10 spectral wave model in order to run with MPI on the University of Texas’ Stampede2 cluster.

Build SWAN with Docker #

The following Dockerfile will build the parallel mpi implementation of SWAN, the single-core serial SWAN model, and the SWAN hcat concatenation utility. The containerized model should be able to be used for 2D non-stationary, 1D or stationary simulations.

USB Cables for Sony Alpha Cameras

Intermittent problems getting my PC to recognize my Sony a6000 and a5100 mirrorless cameras led me to some web searching for solutions that I thought would be either software, driver, system OS, or firmware related. I found the following instructions which shed some light on the issue:

1. Insert USB-A into computer and Micro-USB into camera; and power the camera on.

2. If the computer doesn’t recognize the camera, try another cable…

Reclaim Docker WSL Disk Space

I ran out of system SSD disk space on my Win10 PC at home and tracked a large share of the usage to a vhdx virtual disk image file in a Docker Desktop folder. Below is the summary of what I found.

Docker Desktop for Windows uses WSL to manage all your images and container files and keeps them in a private virtual hard drive (VHDX) called ext4.vhdx.

It’s usually in C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Local\Docker\wsl\data and you can often reclaim some of the space if you’ve cleaned up (pruned your images, etc) with Optimize-Vhd under an administrator PowerShell shell/prompt.