Building Software Environments for Research Computing Clusters

Over the past two years, we have built a diverse software environment of over 200 scientific applications for our research computing platform at Brown University. In this report, we share the policies and best practices we have developed to simplify the configuration and installation of this software environment and to improve its usability and performance. In addition, we present a reference implementation of an environment modules system, called PyModules, that incorporates many of these ideas.