Software installation policy

  • You are allowed to install software in your home or project (/proj/<projectname>) directory, provided that you have a license for the software (if needed) that allows for use on NSC systems1.

  • NSC will provide you with a reasonable amount of help when you are installing your own software. Contact NSC Support if you run into problems that you cannot solve yourself.

  • NSC will install and maintain software in a central location if we believe that it will be useful for many of our users, or if the effort to install it is small (e.g prepackaged software available in CentOS or the EPEL package repository). If you would like NSC to install a certain software package, please contact NSC Support.

Commercial software that you already have a license for

If your license is “node-locked”, you will probably2 not be able to use it on an NSC cluster. All compute nodes have different “host IDs”3 (the identity used by node-locked software to ensure that it is only usable on a single computer). As you have no effective control over which compute node will be used for your job4, node-locked licenses are usually not usable..

If your software uses a “floating license” this usually requires that a license server application runs somewhere to manage the licenses. NSC will not run a license server for you. You can either run it yourself outside NSC, have your local IT department run it for you (recommended) or run it as your own user on the login node.

If you need help in setting up the software or license, or want help in allowing only a certain group of users to use the software, please contact NSC Support.

Commercial software that you do not have a license for

NSC will, in some cases, buy commercial software for use on our systems if we consider the value of that software to be high compared to the cost. Contact NSC Support and propose that we buy the application.

If NSC decides not to pay for the software, you or your research group can still pay for it and run on NSC systems (if the license allows for that).

Before purchasing a license, please make sure you will be able to use it at NSC. E.g the license must allow use on a non-personal HPC cluster owned by Linköping University, and the software must run on the Linux operating system used by the NSC cluster you are using.

  1. Please note that a license that allows you to use the software on your personal (or work) computer does not necessarily allow it to be used at NSC (which is a shared, non-personal computer owned by Linköping University). If unsure, check with the software vendor. ↩

  2. an exception would be e.g a small utility that you could run on the login node (and node-locked to that login node). Please keep in mind that you are not allowed to run any large (memory- or CPU-intensive) application on login nodes. ↩

  3. The host ID is usually derived (or identical to) one of the computer’s IP addresses, the Ethernet card MAC address or the identity of some other physical hardware component. ↩

  4. You can request a specific node for your job, but as that node will likely be running another job already, queue times will on average be much longer than for a regular job. ↩


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