Installation on a computing cluster#

Warning

If you are planning to use bidspm on a compute cluster, it may be easier to use a containerized version of it. The repository includes an Apptainer bidspm.def definition file to help.

Please see the containers section of the documentation.

This relies on the fact that SPM and CPM SPM are Octave compatible, so you will be able to run most of bidspm on a high performance cluster (HPC) without having to worry about MATLAB licenses.

Of course this assumes that Octave is available on your HPC.

Note that it should also be possible to precompile with MATLAB all the things you want to run, but this is not shown here.

The pre-requisite steps are described in the example below that shows how to set up bidspm on one of the HPC of the université catholique de Louvain.

  1. SSH into the HPC

Assumes that you have set things up properly. For the UCLouvain see the documentation on this website (which has some good info about using HPC in general).

If you have everything set up it should be almost as easy as opening a terminal and typing:

ssh lemaitre3

  1. Get SPM

You can simply clone the latest version of SPM from github with:

git clone https://github.com/spm/spm12.git --depth 1

  1. Load the Octave modules

This first step might be different on your HPC, so you might have to figure out what the equivalent modules are called on your HPC (in the UCLouvain case you can find the relevant module by typing module spider octave)

Once you have found the modules load them:

module load releases/2018b
module load Octave/4.4.1-foss-2018b

  1. Recompile SPM for Octave

You need to recompile SPM to make sure it works with Octave. This relies on running the following Make commands:

make -C spm12/src PLATFORM=octave distclean
make -C spm12/src PLATFORM=octave
make -C spm12/src PLATFORM=octave install

  1. Add SPM to the path

In the example below $ shows when you are in the bash terminal and octave:1> shows when you are in the Octave terminal.

Launch Octave:

$ octave

GNU Octave, version 4.4.1
Copyright (C) 2018 John W. Eaton and others.
This is free software; see the source code for copying conditions.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  For details, type 'warranty'.

Octave was configured for "x86_64-pc-linux-gnu".

Additional information about Octave is available at https://www.octave.org.

Please contribute if you find this software useful.
For more information, visit https://www.octave.org/get-involved.html

Read https://www.octave.org/bugs.html to learn how to submit bug reports.
For information about changes from previous versions, type 'news'.

Add the SPM12 folder to the path and save the path:

octave:1> addpath(fullfile(pwd, 'spm12'))
octave:2> savepath
octave:3> exit

  1. Install bidspm

As before install and run an initialization:

git clone \
  -b dev \
  --recurse-submodules \
  https://github.com/cpp-lln-lab/bidspm.git

Warning

There are some warnings thrown during initialization:

octave:1> initCppSpm
warning: addpath: /home/users/r/g/rgau/bidspm/lib/spmup/utlilities/home/users/r/g/rgau/bidspm/lib/spm_2_bids: No such file or directory
warning: called from initCppSpm at line 67 column 5
warning: function /home/users/r/g/rgau/bidspm/lib/spmup/external/cubehelix.m shadows a core library function
warning: called from initCppSpm at line 67 column 5
warning: addpath: /home/users/r/g/rgau/bidspm/src/workflows/stats/home/users/r/g/rgau/bidspm/lib/spmup: No such file or directory

As well as many warnings of the type:

sh: makeinfo: command not found
warning: doc_cache_create: unusable help text found in file 'analyze75info'

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