In March 2026, the Anaconda license will expire and will not be renewed. As such, LCRC will no longer support Anaconda and will have to remove all installations. However, LCRC will begin supporting Miniforge. Miniforge is an open-source edition of Conda that provides access to freely available collections of recipes, build infrastructure, and distributions for the condapackage manager via the conda-forge channel. Miniforge is a community led and supported environment, unlike Anaconda, and does not require paid licensing for use on our HPC resources. For the vast majority of applications, Miniforge is essentially a drop-in replacement for Anaconda.
According to the Anaconda Terms of Service, unlicensed Anaconda installations (self-installed or otherwise) must not be used on LCRC resources once the license expires. We are tentatively planning to remove the current licensed Anaconda environments with a target date of Oct 1, 2025. Also note that the commercial Anaconda channels will likely be blocked when support expires so that users can’t accidentally access them.
When users install their own environments in MIniforge, the packages are installed in ~/.condadirectory by default. This is the same directory that Anaconda (and miniconda) uses by default. If you plan to use the default, you may want to backup the ~/.conda directory first before making changes. However, you can have Miniforge use an alternate directory to contain your environments by editing the .condarc file to modify the env_dirs section as follows:
env_dirs:
- /path/to/new/envs/location
In this way, you could have your anacondaenvironments and your miniforge environments separate.
This reference https://centers.hpc.mil/users/docs/general/anaconda.html shows how you can determine if an environment contains packages from Anaconda. This reference also contains sample scripts on how to convert environments from Anaconda to Miniforge, as well as some other utilities.
Which Anaconda environments are you currently using and will need to be reinstalled with Miniforge? We will install popular responses in the system builds.