Running NCL on NCAR's Supercomputers

If you have an account on one of NCAR's supercomputers: blueice, bluevista, lightning, or tempest, and you want to run NCL, here's what you need to do:

• Set the environment variable NCARG_ROOT to /usr/local
• Add /usr/local/bin to your "path" or "PATH" variable.
• Make sure NCARG_LIB is NOT set.

(For "gale", use "/fs/local" in place of "/usr/local".)

The above steps are ones that should be handled inside one of your .* files in your home directory, like ".cshrc" or ".profile".

For example, if you are running C-shell and you have a ~/.cshrc file, then you can set the NCARG_ROOT environment variable and add "/usr/local/bin" to your path by adding the following lines to the file:

   setenv NCARG_ROOT /usr/local
   set path=(/usr/local/bin $path)

or:

   setenv NCARG_ROOT /usr/local
   setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:$PATH

If you are running bash shell and you have a ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile file, then you can set the NCARG_ROOT environment variable and add "/usr/local/bin" to your PATH variable by adding the following lines to the file:

   export NCARG_ROOT=/usr/local
   export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Note that adding "/usr/local/bin" to your path/PATH variable must be done after this variable has already been initialized to something. You can also add "/usr/local/bin" to the original initialization of path/PATH.

For more information on using NCAR's supercomputers, please visit the CISL High-end Computing page.