ECMWF is updating the default versions of its software packages and libraries used across all user platforms at the centre as part of the regular update cycle.
When?
The changes will take place on 22 May 2018 11:00 - 11:30 UTC
What platforms are affected?
All user platforms at the centre will see their default additional software stack updated:
With the upcoming Implementation of IFS cycle 45r1, this set of defaults is ready to handle the data produced, including all the new parameters introduced in this cycle
Both Magics and Metview see their major version updated.
Magics comes with some improvements on the visualisation of Netcdf-CF and colour setting gradients, and support for Python 3.
Metview 5 will benefit from the new features of Magics 3, with a new interactive layer management, per-colour transparency and FLEXPART support.
See the Magics and Metview news for a more detailed list of changes.
CodesUI is an interactive graphical application built on ecCodes to inspect GRIB and BUFR messages, that has now reached the first public release.
The default versions for other third party software and libraries have historically diverged in the different platforms at the centre. We will take this opportunity to converge our defaults to the same versions across all those platforms, so we can offer a more consistent environment and user experience. Amongst the affected packages we can find popular tools and libraries like Python, R, cdo or netCDF 4. See below for the complete list.
Users are strongly encouraged to test their software applications and data processing chain with the new versions of the various software packages before the date of the change to the default versions. |
The new versions of the software packages can be selected by using the may18 tag in modules. For example:
module swap metview/may18 module load Magics/may18 module swap eccodes/may18 module swap python/may18 |
Users that experience problems with the new default software packages after the update of 10 May will be able to revert to the old default versions. These can be selected with the commands:
module swap metview/old module load Magics/old module swap eccodes/old module swap python/old |
Please let ECMWF know if you need to revert to the old version of any of the packages after the update of the defaults has taken place. Version changes |
This table summarises the changes in the version of the different packages:
| Package | Default version | Release notes | Download page | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before | After | |||
| ecCodes | 2.5.0 | 2.7.3 | ecCodes Releases | |
| ecFlow | 4.7.1 | 4.9.0 | ecFlow Releases | |
| Magics | 2.34.3 | 3.0.3 | Latest News | Magics Releases |
| Metview | 4.9.0 | 5.0.2 | Metview Releases Metview Bundle | |
| ODB API | 0.17.3 | 0.17.6 | Change history | ODB API Release |
ecCodes is now the official ECMWF encoder and decoder for GRIB and BUFR formats. It superseds GRIB-API, for the GRIB format, and EMOSLIB, for the BUFR. If you still use any of those, we encourage you to migrate to ecCodes. |
| Package | Default version | Release notes | Download page | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before | After | |||
| EMOSLIB | 4.5.2 | 4.5.5 | History of EMOSLIB changes | EMOSLIB Releases |
| GRIB-API | 1.24.0 | 1.26.0 | GRIB-API Releases | |
Please see the Release notes for full details of the changes implemented in each package.
Some of the versions in this list may already be the default for a specific package on a certain platform, so no changes will be made in those cases. After the update, all platforms will have the same defaults for all these packages. |