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Run older and newer versions of MESA in Ubuntu-based Docker containers.

See also Evan Bauer's MESA-Docker repository and the MESA marketplace.

MESA stellar evolution simulations are the basis of many of the NuGrid collaboration activitities. The motivation behind the capability of running MESA in Docker containers is primarily one of reproducibility of science. MESA is a big code with lots of modules and dependencies that all have to play perfectly together. Rich Townsend's MESA SDK has significantly taken the pain out of compiling MESA. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to maintain on one actual computer the capability to run different versions of MESAS, especially going back to the older versions. At the same time, a lot of important results have been obtained with these older revisions which in many cases are not obsolete, but just different MESA flavours.

The docker technology provides containers in which a particular version of MESA can run, and to preserve the required system environment for future use. While Evan's Docker repository is geared toward uses on all operating systems this project has been tested on Mac OS and Linux host systems only. However, we do provide the Dockerfiles that are the bases for building the Docker images, and we do provide the images of course as well on the Docker hub repository. The goal of this repository is rather to provide Docker images that allow to run a wide range of MESA versions, at this point as far back as version 4942. Other combinations of Linux OS and MESA SDK can also be easily generated from the Dockerfiles.

Going back further than 4942 is possible in principle, but we are getting to the time before MESA SDK, and maybe even when the intel fortran compiler was the prefered option. For the time being this project does not support earlier versions. However, using the provided Dockerfiles is a good starting point for the ambitious MESA engineer to push back further into the history of MESA revisions. Any success in that direction should trigger a pull request in this repo.

There are three versions of the nudome:yy.v image to run MESA. The major version number yy indicates the year from which the MESA SDK has been taken. The minor version number v may indicates updates or variations. The following mesa versions have been tested in the nudome Docker image:

In each case the test consisted of compiling and running test_suite/7M_prems_to_AGB. It is likely that other versions will run as well in containers from these images.

1. Install Docker on the host OS. Test the installation. Usually that means that receiving some encouraging success message when entering the command docker run hello-world at the terminal.
2. Download a MESA code version nnnnn (where nnnnn stands for the revision number) as listed on the MESA News Archive or on the MESA release page on sourceforge; unzip the ZIP file, e.g. unzip mesa-r5329.zip which will expand the mesa source directory mesa-r5239.

In order to use one of the three docker images only the bin/start_and_login.sh (and maybe the bin/login.sh) is needed.

The scripts in the bin directory can be placed in the user's $HOME/bin directory, or the path to this bin directory is added to the $PATH environment variable, or the the script is directly called with the relative or absolute path. From the top-level directory of the NuDocker repository the container can be started and logged-in with the bin/start_and_login.sh script:

Usage: start_and_login.sh [-m /host/dir/to/mnt/for/runs] ARG1 ARG2 ARG3

ARG1: name of the container 
      Recommend name is the default mesa source tree directory name including
      the mesa version number, such as 'mesa-r9793'.
ARG2: image name
      The name is 'nugrid/nudome:1n.0' where n=4, 6 or 8. If you have built a 
      local image the name maybe be different, see `docker images`
ARG3: full path to the mesa code directory on your host system
      Examples: '/path/to/MESA/mesa-r9793' or '$HOME/MESA/mesa-r9793'
-m  : optionally provide full path to dir (e.g. for runs) to be mounted in
      '$HOME/mnt'

The default usage scenario is to run either a test_suite case inside the mesa source tree, or to create a run directory at top level of the mesa source tree. For this, the default would mount the source code directory (ARG3) into the container where it appears as $HOME/mesa, i.e. the dir mesa in the user home dir inside the container. Optionally a separate host directory for run directories can be mounted with the -m option. This will be mounted in the container home directory under $HOME/mnt.

The environment variable MESA_DIR is set inside the container to $HOME/mesa.

bin/start_and_login.sh mesa-r9575 nugrid/nudome:16.0 /Volumes/Astro/L/CODE/MESA/mesa-r9575

starts a container of the image nugrid/nudome:16.0 and mounts the host directory /Volumes/Astro/L/CODE/MESA/mesa-r9575 which contains the mesa source directory of version 9575. The assigned container name is mesa-r9575.

bin/start_and_login.sh -m /scratch/data17 mesa-r9575 nugrid/nudome:16.0 /Volumes/Astro/L/CODE/MESA/mesa-r9575

does the same as above, but in addition it mounts /scratch/data17 in the container home directory under $HOME/mnt where mesa run directories can be placed.

• When exiting the container (command line exit) it will continue to exist in status Exited.
• The conatiner can be re-entered with the login.sh script: bin/login.sh container_name
• The command docker rm container_name permanently ends the container.
• The command docker exec -t -i container_name /bin/bash would create a second login shell into an existing and running container with the name container_name.

The container_name has been specified during the initial start of the container, and is also the hostname. It is listed in the column NAMES of the command docker ps -a (see below).

At this point the nudome image does not provide any tools that may be used for plotting. This would be done on the host system through the many available tools available e.g. from the MESA marketplace. One such tool is NuGrid's NuGridPy that can be easily installed via the NuGridPy pip package, see also usage examples: example 1, example2.

Docker containers are actually doing things, and they are launched by activating a Docker image. Containers are instances of images. The nudome image comes in three versions. You can launch as many containers of each of these image versions as you like, just give them different names. The containers are what you login to and where you actually run MESA.

These are the only docker commands you may need:

If you want to try different combinations of Ubuntu and MESA SDK versions, or would like to add additional software to the nudome image build your own Docker image. In the build_docker_images directory use the make command to build the three nudome versions. Edit the makefile to specify version numbers for the template target nudomexx.

The make command will insert the MESA SDK and Ubuntu version numbers into the Dockerfile based on the Dockerfile_template. Any additional packages you may want to install using Ubuntu's package manager apt-get may just be added to the apt_packages_nudome.txt file.

make nudome14

will build the nudome:14.0 Docker image. The makefile target names of version 16.0 and 18.0 are nudome16 and nudome18 respectively. A template target nudomexx is provided for new builds with different version combinations and/or other modifications.

• Most testing has been done on Mac OSX hosts (OSX 10.13.6, Docker version 18.06.1-ce-mac73).
• On Linux host system, possibly depending on the setup of your docker installation, you may have to set the permissions on the mounted host directories (including the mesa host dir) to world, such as chmod -R ugo+rwX mesa-rnnnn.
• On Linux host system, possibly depending on the setup of your docker installation, files written as the user in the Docker container may have a user and group ID different than the one the user has on the host system.

• Add capability to run PPN.
• Add jupyter notebook server that can be accessed from host to integrate analysis tools in the form of notebooks.