Enable setup and installation on Balfrin (CSCS)

sadamov commented 1 year ago

Fixes #41

sadamov commented 1 year ago

I made some cosmetic changes to the docs and upgraded the python version. As these changes are so minor I don't think we need a separate PR.

cosunae commented 1 year ago

thanks @sadamov for the contribution. In view of what was required to extend the installation to balfrin, I would like to propose a different mechanism to the installation procedure, based on the following thoughts:

installation methods like if $machine == "XX" are harder to maintained, as opposed to installation methods like conda install, spack install, that do not need to maintain specific instructions for various machines.
The global spack installations will not be supported in the future, therefore we should consider moving away from the use of source /project/g110/spack/user/admin-daint/spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh
I would avoid combining multiple package manager, in this case conda and spack. Since we use conda, do we need spack (see the following) ?
I think iconarray should not depend directly on eccodes, since it depends already on cfgrib, which will depend on eccodes. Therefore using two versions of eccodes (conda and spack) is not necessary and potentially conflicting.
The dependency on cosmo eccodes definitions can be managed by cloning: https://github.com/COSMO-ORG/eccodes-cosmo-resources and setting the env variable GRIB_DEFINITION_PATH pointing to it. Since there is link, there is also probably no need to use spack.
With all of the above, reducing the installation to git clone of cosmo-eccodes-definitions and setting GRIB_DEFINITION_PATH, we should not need to specialize for each machine, and therefore we could aim a single instruction for all machines ?

I hope this helps, I let the main reviewer @victoria-cherkas to decide if that makes sense and whether it belongs to this PR or somewhere else.