Installing spack repositories

Hello,

I am working on building ACCESS-ESM1.5 from source using these instructions, but I am getting an issue at the spack install step.

Spack is unable to install the GCOM and UM packages. During the build, it prompts me for my Git username/password, but although my git account is linked to ACCESS, the installation still fails. I believe it may be because these repositories are private:

Could I please request access to these repositories, or if there are any alternative ways to work around this issue.

Thank you in advance for any help

Kind regards,
Saanvi

Hi Saanvi,

I maintain ACCESS-NRI’s Spack configuration. Can you please clarify if your ultimate objective is to modify GCOM and/or UMv7 source and rebuild those components? We can then provide instructions that specifically address your requirements.

Thanks,
Harshula

Hi Harshula,

Thank you for your reply. My aim is to modify the UMv7 and CICE4.1 components.

Kind regards,
Saanvi

Hi Saanvi

Have you seen this post about sea ice diagnostics in esm1.5:

Several of the the thermodynamics related diagnostics we ended up turning off in the ACCESS-NRI configurations. They are available in ESM1.6 now. which uses CICE5 instead. Although ESM1.6 isn’t formally released yet, it is mostly complete. We could point you to configurations and control runs to get this project started.

Either way - the build process for esm1.5 and esm1.6 is very similar.

Anton

Hi Anton,

Since I am still in the early stages, I would be interested in looking into ESM1.6 for the project. It would be great if you could point me to the control runs and configurations, and any documentation or next steps that you think would be useful for getting started.

Thanks!

Kind regards,
Saanvi

Hi Saanvi

As you have a MOSRS account, we’ll organise access to the github repositories. Ill email you for your username (although adding it to your profile is also a good idea.)

The experiments listed in ESM1.6 Spin-up experiments are most of the current experiments. Anything at the end of the table using access-esm1p6/2026.04.000 represents final versions for the upcoming esm1.6 release and the data can be used however the data is yet to be post-processed or moved to it’s final storage location.

Assuming you are interest in one of the piControl - the places to start are:

  • /g/data/p73/archive/CMIP7/ACCESS-ESM1-6/production/Ndep2-PI-CNP-concentrations and /g/data/p73/archive/CMIP7/ACCESS-ESM1-6/production/PI-concentrations for the concentrations driven, and
  • output100 onwards of /g/data/p73/archive/CMIP7/ACCESS-ESM1-6/production/Ndep2-PI-CNP-emissions for the emissions driven

Again note these paths will change in the medium term.

Anton

Do you have a sense of how complicated the changes you need are ?

It is easier to use / setup and share builds with the “Prerelease” infrastructure - Create Prereleases and Releases for an ACCESS Model - ACCESS-Hive Docs than install from scratch. However if changes are complicated, it is slow to iterate around minor changes.

We recently updated spack versions (from 0.22 to 1.1). The instructions are getting updated for installing directly with spack, can you please use the instructions in Modify and build an ACCESS model's source code - ACCESS-Hive Docs for now. Note they are still a draft, and so will get merged into the main docs down the line.

I am not expecting the changes to be too complex. I want to perturb sea ice (in the southern hemisphere) using either the ghost flux or nudging method, which will require minor source code changes in the CICE or UM, depending on which method I end up doing.

I haven’t tried setting up the Prerelease infrastructure yet, but if it is sufficient for what I need, I will give it a go.

I also wanted to clarify one of the steps in the instructions

cd /g/data/$PROJECT/$USER/spack/1.1/spack-packages
git fetch --unshallow
git switch -c <spack_packages_version> <spack_packages_version>

The spack-packages directory doesn’t exist for me, am I meant to create the directory myself? A bit more detail on this step would be really helpful.

Thanks

You can skip / ignore that step to set spack-packages version, the instructions will get removed. (it’s a hangover from the old instructions)