Will it be convenient (in the long run) to use Windows?

[adundunis]

Hi everyone, newbie in ROMS here.

I understand that ROMS runs in a UNIX environment. I currently have Windows as the OS and am admittedly not yet familiar with the UNIX environment.

Now, I'm torn between:

a) starting ROMS with a UNIX environment (this means I will also have to do my other ROMS-unrelated works with UNIX, which would be pretty inconvenient as I am really used to using Windows all my life)

or

b) just using a Linux emulator (Cygwin) for Windows and hopefully run ROMS with it (will I encounter many technical problems in the future if I do this?)

I am also considering an additional option: c) Try to run ROMS with Cygwin in Windows at first. And when I've got my grasp on ROMS and will actually have to do intense modeling, that's the time I purchase a separate computer with UNIX as the OS.

What do you guys think? Sorry if my dilemma seems pretty basic. Some enlightenment and tips (preferably detailed) will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much!

[jcwarner]

running roms in cygwin these days is actually a lot easier than it used to be. When you download cygwin, you can also get gfortran compiler (nice but slower than ifort and pgi) and you can also get the netcdf libraries all precompiled with that version of gfortran. you need to make sure you select other certain options in cygwin for the download such as gmake, subversion. I think it also has mpi with it (or you can download MPICH2 for free - precompiled for windows). We also purchased ifort and installed that for windows to test a different compiler, and of course we also have pgi on a linux cluster so we can test different systems.

-john

[adundunis]

running roms in cygwin these days is actually a lot easier than it used to be. When you download cygwin, you can also get gfortran compiler (nice but slower than ifort and pgi) and you can also get the netcdf libraries all precompiled with that version of gfortran. you need to make sure you select other certain options in cygwin for the download such as gmake, subversion. I think it also has mpi with it (or you can download MPICH2 for free - precompiled for windows). We also purchased ifort and installed that for windows to test a different compiler, and of course we also have pgi on a linux cluster so we can test different systems.

-john

Thank you very much for your response, Sir! Highly appreciated.

[rduran]

A very appealing option is just becoming available: run ubuntu natively within windows 10. Search for "ubuntu windows 10" you will find plenty of info for example

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/ ... n-windows/


It will be interesting to see how this option handles ROMS so if those first explorers can report back their findings that would be great.

[csherwood]

The good news: Tarandeep Kalra and I successfully installed ROMS (COAWST version) in the bash console of Windows 10.

My version of Ubuntu in my bash window is not the latest (16.10 or higher is now available).
csherwood@IGSAGIEGWSCSH10:/mnt/d/u/sed_toy$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
Release: 14.04
Codename: trusty

The installation procedure is exactly the same as a real Ubuntu system (e.g. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=3830), and we made the same mistakes we always make, culminating in forgetting to put colons instead of spaces in LD_LIBRARY_PATH part of the .bashrc file, which now looks like this:

Code: Select all

export zlib=/usr/local/zlib
export hdf5=/usr/local/hdf5
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/hdf5/include -I/usr/local/zlib/include -I/usr/local/netcdf/include"
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/hdf5/lib -L/usr/local/zlib/lib -L/usr/local/netcdf/lib"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/hdf5/lib:/usr/local/zlib/lib:/usr/local/netcdf/lib"

export NetCDF=/usr/local/netcdf
export NETCDF_LIBDIR=/usr/local/netcdf/lib
export NETCDF_INCDIR=/usr/local/netcdf/include

export MCT_INCDIR=/home/csherwood/src/COAWST/Lib/MCT/mct
export MCT_LIBDIR=/home/csherwood/src/COAWST/Lib/MCT/mct
export MPEU_INCDIR=/home/csherwood/src/COAWST/Lib/MCT/mpeu
export MPEU_INCDIR=/home/csherwood/src/COAWST/Lib/MCT/mpeu

export=/usr/local/mpich2/bin:$PATH ; export PATH
export=/usr/local/netcdf/bin:$PATH ; export PATH

Now it runs find, and using VcXsrv to provide an X server,

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install ncview

provided use with the ability to have a quick look at the output of sedtoy.


The bad news: We have not gotten mpiexec to run, so we are limited to running serial codes. The mpif90 part seems to work fine, and we can compile and run OceanM (actually, coawstM) with one processor, but we get this error when trying MPICH2:

csherwood@IGSAGIEGWSCSH10:/mnt/d/u/inlet_test$ mpiexec -np 2 -verbose ./coawstM coupling_inlet_test.in
host: IGSAGIEGWSCSH10
[mpiexec@IGSAGIEGWSCSH10] HYDU_sock_is_local (./utils/sock/sock.c:545): getifaddrs failed
[mpiexec@IGSAGIEGWSCSH10] main (./ui/mpich/mpiexec.c:280): unable to check if IGSAGIEGWSCSH10 is local

Compiling with -j 8 works fine.

Any suggestions on the MPI problem?

[ezaron]

I assume this is a sincere question, rather than trolling to start a flame-war. Once you get over the modest (but never-ending) learning curve, you will find so much better tools are available in the native linux world. Your path will be easier if you bite the bullet and buy a decent book on linux system administration so that you understand the filesystem layout and all the basic commands. Of course cygwin is great, but it is kind of like replacing your modern gigabit ethernet with a dial-up modem to aol.com.

All the best,
Ed

[rduran]

Ed, they are not using cygwin.

I don't have any help for your question, sorry to say. But wanted to mention that an alternative that will allow one to use a display is to instal Xming free software, double click that and that is it, you will be able to run your apps with display (so far tested octave and ncview). I have been using the linux subsystem since it was beta (about two years) and so far I have not missed anything a "normal" installation of ubuntu may be able to do. However, I have not used ROMS in last few years... Hopefully the problem reported above has a solution.

[ezaron]

lol. Aha, I was replying to the OP. Just noticed it was from 2 yr ago.