Julia

Owned by glenn-johnson
Last updated: Feb 12, 2020
1 min read

There are a couple of issues with the julia installation, both from the older modules, and the 2019.1 stack.

  1. The Julia package system requires some extra steps to get user packages installed. The key is that you need to have a user project in place at a higher priority than the system project.
    1. Create a config directory if you do not already have one
      mkdir -p ~/.julia/config
    2. create a startup.jl file if you do not already have one, with the following contents:
      pushfirst!(Base.DEPOT_PATH,string(ENV["HOME"],"/",".julia"))
    3. create a project skeleton if you do not already have one
      mkdir -p ~/.julia/environments/v1.1
    4. create a Project.toml file if you do not already have one.
      touch ~/.julia/environments/v1.1/Project.toml

      With that you will have a local project loaded in julia. Steps 3-4 could be replaced by starting julia with the project specified as:
      JULIA_PROJECT=~/.julia/environments/v1.1/ julia and then writing out the project from julia itself.

  2. There is also an issue with Julia in that it does not run on the older sandy bridge and ivy bridge nodes. Although the build flags were set to be able to run on that hardware, the Julia JIT ignores those flags and builds the Julia JIT image optimized for the host it was built on. To avoid nodes that can not run julia, add the following option to the job submission, -l m_thread=40

Both of these issues will be resolved in the Julia-1.3.1 package that will be in the 2020.1 software stack.