Attention

The Bessemer HPC service was decommissioned on 2025-10-31 and can no longer be accessed by users. Removal of Bessemer references in our documentation is ongoing

Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL)

GDAL is a library used by many Geographic Information Systems (GIS) packages for converting between many different raster and vector GIS data formats. It also includes command-line utilities for data translation and processing. It is released under an an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Usage

After connecting to Stanage (see Establishing a SSH connection), start an interactive session with the following command:

srun --pty bash -i

Load by running one of the following:

module load GDAL/3.6.2-foss-2022b
module load GDAL/3.5.0-foss-2022a
module load GDAL/3.2.1-foss-2020b

This will:

  • add several GDAL programs to your PATH environment variable

  • allow other programs to make use of (dynamically link against) the GDAL library

  • activate the modules associated with the specific foss toolchain

You can run gdal-config --version to test that you are running the required version

$ gdal-config --version
3.3.2

Some commonly used command-line programs that GDAL provides are:

  • gdaladdo

  • gdalbuildvrt

  • gdal-config

  • gdal_contour

  • gdaldem

  • gdalenhance

  • gdal_grid

  • gdalinfo

  • gdallocationinfo

  • gdalmanage

  • gdal_rasterize

  • gdalserver

  • gdalsrsinfo

  • gdaltindex

  • gdaltransform

  • gdal_translate

  • gdalwarp

  • nearblack

  • ogr2ogr

  • ogrinfo

  • ogrlineref

  • ogrtindex

  • testepsg

The gdal... utilities are mostly for processing raster GIS data formats, whilst the ogr... utilities are for processing vector GIS data formats.

Documentation

Documentation is available on the project site.

Installation notes

This section is primarily for administrators of the system. GDAL has been installed using the default Easybuild config files.

Build logs and test reports can be found in $EBROOTGDAL/easybuild with a given module loaded.

Direct dependencies for latest version of GDAL