Dear Tomasz, I'm sorry to hear you are having difficulty at Marin. I'm afraid to say that the description provided by your tech support is so general that it is very difficult to even understand what the problem they are having is. That said, there are a few comments I can glean which might help you: 1. Firedrake basically* does not install anything in the users home directory. Since tech support provide no information about what the error is, it's impossible for me to draw any inference about why they believe otherwise. (* If virtualenv is not already installed then Firedrake does in fact execute "pip install virtualenv" as the installing user, however this virtualenv package is only used by the install script so does not explain what tech support are reporting). 2. The usual use case for Firedrake, even on clusters, is to run firedrake-install yourself. This enables you to upgrade whenever you want and to switch branches as and when necessary. When working on a cluster, you might need some help from the cluster support to have compiled dependencies installed, to set the right environment variables and maybe to build PETSc. However there is usually no advantage and several drawbacks in a central install. 3. I notice that we have had no requests for support from the cluster admins at Marin. There are no github issues or messages on the list or chat raising specific bugs. It is exceptionally difficult for us to assist with issues we don't even know exist. Regards, David On Tue, 20 Dec 2016 at 09:13 Tomasz Salwa [RPG] <mmtjs@leeds.ac.uk> wrote: Dear all, We have been trying to install Firedrake on a local cluster at MARIN, with little success. Perhaps you can give a hint? I attach below the reply from the IT man with a rough problem description. Regards, Tomasz Good afternoon, It seems the install of Firedrake we did earlier in Marclus3 is not working for the students. The only explanation I can think of is that besides writing data in the install dir several things are also written in the user home dir during installation. I have not been able to exactly track down what data that could be... All in all, unfortunately I need to conclude that at the moment we simply can't support running Firedrake on our cluster(s) It's setup and running is simply not suited to our Linux distribution and our cluster setup. Regards, -- Jan-Albert -- Dr David Ham Department of Mathematics Imperial College London