Question for @WeiqunZhang, @lucafedeli88, and others who may want to chime in.

How should I know which one to set for the environment variable BOOST_ROOT among the ones I find on Perlmutter?

$ ls /global/common/software/spackecp/perlmutter/e4s-23.08/default/spack/opt/spack/linux-sles15-zen3/gcc-12.3.0/ | grep "boost" 
boost-1.83.0-2duyuvmto7nxhdxbmtdzfqta2zd2e6gp
boost-1.83.0-2yqnluod73zoeujxzoe2tbob2d6vgbok
boost-1.83.0-7v65wrlbpdcvmjqcxl5ozjlokrmsxolu
boost-1.83.0-bofy2gbvluorrgdlsqeyw6cexrbsmpdu
boost-1.83.0-jn7ias45dtk7uwh4baobb2ndhq73ndxc
boost-1.83.0-nxqk3hnci5g3wqv75wvsmuke3w74mzxi

Do you know if we always checked with NERSC support each time we updated this in the past?

I was able to build from scratch on Perlmutter following the docs and applying this patch just now.

Feedback I got from NERSC on this:

Each of those 6 installs have slightly different variations, by loading the e4s module and activating the gcc environment you can specify the differences. Here are the commands:

module load e4s
spack env activate gcc
spack find -lpfc boost

This will give the output:

nxqk3hn [email protected]%gcc ~atomic~chrono~clanglibcpp~container~context~contract~coroutine~date_time~debug~exception~fiber~filesystem~graph~graph_parallel~icu~iostreams~json~locale~log~math~mpi+multithreaded~nowide~numpy~pic~program_options~python~random~regex~serialization+shared~signals~singlethreaded~stacktrace~system~taggedlayout~test~thread~timer~type_erasure~versionedlayout~wave build_system=generic cxxstd=98 patches=a440f96 visibility=hidden /global/common/software/spackecp/perlmutter/e4s-23.08/94543/spack/opt/spack/linux-sles15-zen3/gcc-12.3.0/boost-1.83.0-nxqk3hnci5g3wqv75wvsmuke3w74mzxi
...
...

If an option is preceded by a "+" then it means it's ON. If it's preceded by "~" it means that it's OFF. You can get more information about each option if after typing the above commands, you run spack info boost.

I would also like to warn you that the e4s-23.08 stack will also likely be removed in the not too distant future (https://docs.nersc.gov/applications/e4s/#e4s-support-timeline). Therefore you may consider doing your own install of boost with Spack or otherwise in your project's /global/common/software directory and pointing to that.

To be discussed with @lucafedeli88, @WeiqunZhang, @atmyers, @kngott, @ax3l (once back in office), etc.

@lucafedeli88

NERSC is asking if there are specific documented requirements for boost, in order to guess which variant of the packages above might be the right one. Do you know of any specific requirements, beyond the version being higher than 1.66?