Newer version of ANTS in analsyis3 or other env on gadi?

Technical Infrastructure
1

The UM ancillary generation process uses ANTS (behind MOSRS firewall). ANTS is available on analysis3, but it is an older version (0.19) which doesn’t work with some of the Regional Ancillary Suite ANTS (1.0) or the JULES offline ancillary suite ANTS (1.1).

I can run existing scripts on gadi using e.g.
module use /g/data/access/ngm/modules; module load ants/1.1.0

But that environment is bare bones. I (and others) would like access to additional tools from analysis3 such as ipython, matplotlib, xarray and rioxarray, in order to undertake ancillary development for JULES and CABLE. Therefore, 1) can analysis3 be updated to a newer version of ANTS or 2) can an analysis3-like environment be created for our use?

2

The ancillary suites normally install and use their own copy of ants rather than using the one in the conda environment. The conda environment only supplies dependencies.

If the dependencies are compatible (they probably are) you should be able to swap out the module load ants/1.1.0 in the ancillary suite with analysis3.

Otherwise there’s a conda package definition for ants at ngmo-environments/conda/mo_ants at main · MetOffice/ngmo-environments · GitHub

3

Thanks Scott, although we want to use ants interactively (for development) rather than through the ancillary suite. Also I haven’t been able to get RAS ANTS code (based on ANTS 1.0) running with analysis3 ANTS (0.19).

Confusingly, the RAS uses module load ants/0.18 even though it’s sourcing a branch from ANTS 1.0 (but that’s beside the point here).

With the conda package definition you linked to, are you suggesting we create our own env using this as a base + any other packages we need? I thought that was being discouraged on gadi because of the high inode counts?

4

Creating your own environment is an option, if inodes are an issue you can put the environment in a container.

It looks like the most recent versions of iris have removed some functions that ants uses, you may need to use an older version of analysis3. Version 23.10 shows fewer issues when running through its tests - errors in the lake filling routines are the only concerning ones.

svn co https://code.metoffice.gov.uk/svn/ancil/ants/trunk ants
cd ants
module load conda/analysis3-23.10
pytest

Have a go setting PYTHONPATH=/path/to/ants/lib with this environment loaded and see if that works for you

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5

If you need to create your own env you can do it on top of one of the existing ones: Building custom python environments on top of conda/analysis3 — CLEX CMS Blog

Edit: URL updated

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