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Warning!

Puhti and Mahti are being decommissioned in stages, and their storage areas will become fully unavailable from 15 October 2026. Clean up unnecessary files and move any data you need to keep by 31 August 2026. See the Roihu data migration guide for instructions on transferring your data to Roihu.

Puhti scratch is very full: keep only active data there and move or delete everything else. No new Puhti scratch quota will be granted.

GDAL

GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) is a GIS translator library for accessing and transforming geospatial data. Most commonly it is used in file format or coordinate system changes.

Available

GDAL is available with following versions:

  • 3.12.4 - in the 3.44.9 QGIS in Roihu.
  • 3.12.2 - in the 3.14.5 python-geo in Roihu
  • 3.12.2 stand-alone: gdal in Roihu. Additionally is available proj/9.7.0.
  • 3.9.2 - in the 3.38 QGIS and 3.11.10 geoconda in Puhti
  • 3.9.1 - in the 3.11.9 geoconda in Puhti and Mahti
  • 3.8.5 stand-alone: gdal in Puhti
  • 3.8.3 - in the 3.31 QGIS in Puhti and LUMI
  • 3.6.2 - in the 3.10.x geoconda in Puhti and Mahti
  • 3.4.3 stand-alone: gdal in Puhti
  • Also in: r-env and OrfeoToolBox

Note

The stand-alone GDAL and R modules don't have Python bindings installed so e.g gdal_calc works only in the geoconda and qgis modules. Also, the supported file formats vary between the modules. gdal/3.4.3 has the most limited driver support and no support for virtual drivers. It is possible to add more drivers to standalone and r-env GDAL installations, please ask. geoconda and qgis GDAL installations are based on conda gdal package and are impossible to change regarding drivers support. Use gdalinfo --formats to see supported raster formats and ogrinfo --formats for vector formats.

Usage

GDAL is included in the modules listed above, so it can be used when any of these modules is loaded.

The stand-alone gdal module is mainly meant for building software on top of GDAL, but can also be used for command-line usage. To load stand-alone gdal use:

# GDAL 3.12.2 (Roihu)
gcc/15.2.0  openmpi/5.0.10 gdal/3.12.2

# GDAL 3.8.5 (Puhti)
module load gcc/13.2.0 openmpi/5.0.5 gdal/3.8.5

# GDAL 3.4.3 (Puhti)
module load gcc/11.3.0 gdal/3.4.3

You can test if GDAL loaded successfully with following

gdalinfo --version

With r-env gdal commands can be used as (only in Puhti):

apptainer_wrapper exec gdalinfo --version

Note that, starting with GDAL 3.11, parts of the GDAL utilities are available from a new single gdal program that accepts commands and subcommands.

Using files directly from object storage services or cloud, inc Allas

GDAL supports virtual network based file systems for reading and sometimes writing from several cloud storage systems, inc CSC Allas, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure etc. Please check CSC's Using geospatial files directly from cloud, inc Allas tutorial for instructions and examples.

Virtual rasters

With large quantities of raster data (also in Allas), the most convenient method of accessing them might be GDAL virtual rasters.

License

GDAL is licensed under an MIT/X style license

Citation

GDAL/OGR contributors (2026). GDAL/OGR Geospatial Data Abstraction software Library. Open Source Geospatial Foundation. URL https://gdal.org, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5884351

Acknowledgement

Please acknowledge CSC and Geoportti in your publications, it is important for project continuation and funding reports. As an example, you can write "The authors wish to thank CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland (urn:nbn:fi:research-infras-2016072531) and the Open Geospatial Information Infrastructure for Research (Geoportti, urn:nbn:fi:research-infras-2016072513) for computational resources and support".

Installation

Standalone GDAL was installed to Puhti using Spack and its GDAL package definition. For other installations, see respective application page.

Installation settings for 3.12.2. + means enabled option, 

gdal+deflate+expat+gif+hdf5+iconv+jpeg+liblzma+libxml2+lz4+netcdf+openjpeg+parquet+png+postgresql+zstd

Installation settings for 3.8.5. + means enabled option, ~ disabled. 

gdal@3.8.5+arrow+curl+deflate+expat+geos+gif+hdf4+hdf5+iconv+jpeg+liblzma+libxml2+lz4+netcdf+openjpeg+png+postgresql+spatialite+sqlite3+zstd
~archive~armadillo~basisu~blosc~brunsli~cfitsio~crnlib~cryptopp~csharp~ecw~filegdb~freexl~fyba~gta~hdfs~heif~idb~ipo~java~jxl~kdu~kea~lerc
~libaec~libcsf~libkml~libqb3~luratech~mongocxx~mrsid~mssql_ncli~mssql_odbc~mysql~odbc~odbccpp~ogdi~opencad~opencl~openexr~openssl~oracle
~parquet~pcidsk~pcre2~pdfium~podofo~poppler~python~qhull~rasterlite2~rdb~sfcgal~teigha~tiledb~webp~xercesc
build_system=cmake build_type=Release generator=ninja patches=52459dc

Installation settings for 3.4.3: 

--with-libtiff=/appl/spack/v018/install-tree/gcc-11.3.0/libtiff-4.3.0-4xvmnn
--with-geotiff=/appl/spack/v018/install-tree/gcc-11.3.0/libgeotiff-1.6.0-m66qzg
--with-libjson-c=/appl/spack/v018/install-tree/gcc-11.3.0/json-c-0.15-cvy2yv
--with-proj=/appl/spack/v018/install-tree/gcc-11.3.0/proj-8.2.1-zj2pln
--with-libtool=yes
--with-libz=/appl/spack/v018/install-tree/gcc-11.3.0/zlib-1.2.12-tpcwxh
--with-liblzma=yes
--with-jpeg=/appl/spack/v018/install-tree/gcc-11.3.0/libjpeg-turbo-2.1.3-hnflqm"

References