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SciDB Community Edition Installation Guide

SciDB Community Edition Installation Guide

Owned by Jason Kinchen
Feb 16, 2021

This guide discusses the pre-installation tasks required for installing SciDB and provides instructions for downloading, building, and installing the SciDB Community Edition (CE) in single node or multi-node configurations.  

SciDB Community Edition (CE) is a simple, demo version of SciDB that you can install in single or multi-node configurations.  SciDB's production-quality, Enterprise Edition (EE) accommodates real-world topologies and security schemes. Contact Paradigm4 if you are interested in a SciDB Enterprise Edition system customized for your own specific environment. 

Requirements

SciDB runs on the following platforms:

  • Ubuntu 12.04 or 14.04

    You must build and install SciDB on the same version of Ubuntu. For example, you cannot build it on 12.04 and run it on 14.04.

  • CentOS 6

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6

    SciDB can run on CentOS 6 or RHEL 6, but you can only build it on CentOS (not RHEL).

SciDB requires a 64-bit (x86_64 or amd64) platform.

A complete SciDB installation is a multi-database environment that includes: 

  • the core SciDB engine.
  • PostgreSQL, the open source SQL database engine used for system catalog data.
  • ScaLAPACK/MPI, used as a computational engine for dense linear algebra.

Installation Notes

These installation instructions presume the following:

  • In a cluster of one or more hosts, these instructions call the hosts: <hostIP0>, <hostIP1>, etc. You can use any IP address or a name that resolves (via DNS) to an IP address.
  • All the hosts have a scidb user, which belongs to the scidb group.
  • You have passwords for both the root and scidb users on all the hosts.
  • The host 0's IP address, <hostIP0>, becomes both the build host and the machine that hosts the PostgreSQL server managing the SciDB system catalog.
  • Unless otherwise stated, issue all the commands from <hostIP0> as the scidb user.
  • Without loss of generality, on <hostIP0> assume the CE version installs into <dev_dir>/scidbtrunk.
  • The <dev_dir> directory is owned by the scidb user.
  • The disk holding <dev dir> requires 50 GB of free space before installation.

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