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GDAL

License information

GDAL is mostly licensed under an MIT style license. However, due to the many dependencies and other included packages, some components have a different license. The license information can be found in the LICENSE.TXT file in the GitHub.

User documentation

What is GDAL?

GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the alling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing.

Installing

The GDAL 3.5.x versions all use a similar installation process. GDAL has an enormous amount of optional features, each requiring additional dependencies. The GDAL modules built by the available EasyConfigs are far from feature-complete (and several features would in fact not even make sense on LUMI). However, in version 3.5.3 (from LUMI/23.09 on) we did enable some additional features.

The build process of GDAL is not completely stable and for that reason we cannot use a parallel build process. As a result, building GDAL 3.5.x is extremely slow and can easily take 2 hours or more.

From GDAL 3.6 on, a different build process was imposed and the older build process is no longer supported. Unfortunately this new build process comes with several so far unsolved problems on LUMI so we cannot currently offer newer versions of GDAL.

User-installable modules (and EasyConfigs)

Install with the EasyBuild-user module: 

eb <easyconfig> -r
To access module help after installation and get reminded for which stacks and partitions the module is installed, use module spider GDAL/<version>.

EasyConfig:

Technical documentation

General remarks

Installing GDAL takes a lot of time. It is a huge package and parallel compile is known to sometimes fail so the build process has to be entirely sequential and can take hours.

EasyBuild

GDAL 3.5.2 for cpeGNU 22.08

  • The EasyConfig file is derived from the EasyBuilders recipes, and with some adaptations copied from the CSCS EasyConfigs.

  • It looks like there may be timing issues during the build. With the same EasyConfig builds sometimes fail and sometimes succeed. Hence we need to do a slow sequential build.

  • GDAL has way more optional features than are enabled in this EasyConfig, so feel free to further extend.

GDAL 3.5.3 for cpeGNU 23.09

  • 3.5 is the last version of GDAL that can be built using autoconf, and this is the most recent bugfix release as of now.

  • The EasyConfig is a trivial port of the 3.5.2 one, with the usual version updates and aligning the structure a bit more to other recent LUMI easyconfigs.