Running WRF Singularity Container on TACC Systems

So prior the the recent TACC training on containers I was trying to get our WRF Docker images to run up on the TACC HPC infrastructure using Singularity.

I checked the version of Singularity on the Lonestar5 cluster and it was behind the most recent versions a bit, but luckily there are Docker images for Singularity so you can play with whatever version might be required. (The version on Lonestar5 may already be updated by now too, recent version on Stampede2 was 3.4.3.)

Reproducing Conda Environments

This short summary is based on the Anaconda blog post here https://www.anaconda.com/moving-conda-environments/. The original blog post is a great high-level summary for the various methods in conda for reproducing environments.

• OS and platform specific (pulls from repos)

  # On source environment:
  conda list --explicit > spec-list.txt
  

  # New conda environment:
  conda create --name new_env_name --file spec-list.txt
  

• Different platforms and OS (pulls from repos, also includes pip installed packages)

  # On source environment:
  conda env export > env.yml
  

  # New conda environment:
  conda env create -f env.yml
  

• Platform and OS specific, no internet on target

Decompiling Python .pyc Files

Have you accidentally deleted an important Python source file or are looking to inspect the contents of a .pyc file that has been provided to you? Luckily .pyc files contain enough information to reproduce the corresponding .py file. NB: this only applies to Python2. You won’t get the original comments or the original formatting, and there may be a few tweaks you need to do for the new .py file to be completely valid–but this can be a savior for some unexpected loss of source files if the .pyc files still exist.