Perl

Accessibility

Perl is installed on the operating system of each compute node:

[netid@compute_hostname ~]$ perl --version

This is perl 5, version 16, subversion 3 (v5.16.3) built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi
(with 44 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
...

Perl Module Policy

We provide a version of Perl through modules or the operating system. Installation of additional user libraries can be done in a Perl environment using perl-virtualenv.

For a helpful Perl tutorial, see: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/perl/perl_modules.htm. Additionally, O'Reilly Media is a well regarded source for Perl

Installing Perl Packages Using perl-virtualenv

One of the best things about Perl is the number of packages provided by the user community. Installing packages generally requires root access but that is not a viable solution in the HPC environment.

An easy solution is to use perl-virtualenv on a compute node to create a consistent personal Perl environment. An example of usage:

[netid@i0n1 ~]$ perl-virtualenv my_project    # Create virtual environment
perl path: /usr/bin/perl
venv path: /home/uxx/netid/my_project
[netid@i0n1 ~]$ source my_project/bin/activate # Activate virtual environment
(my_project)[netid@i0n1 ~]$ cpanm -i Config::Trivial
--> Working on Config::Trivial
Fetching http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/A/AT/ATRICKETT/Config-Trivial-0.81.tar.gz ... OK
Configuring Config-Trivial-0.81 ... OK
...
4 distributions installed
(my_project)[netid@i0n1 ~]$

Once your environment is created, it can be activated for any future jobs or interactive sessions using the source </path/to/environment> command.