I am using yt 3.1 on a cluster and the current version is installed in a directory /work/../../sw/yt-3.1/yt-x86_64/bin/yt , now I would like to try the new version 3.3.1 but I still want to use the older version in parallel to compare. Please let me know what is the procedure to get a different version in a different directory.
Just run the latest version of the install script in a folder like /work/../../sw/yt-3.3. The install script creates an isolated environment that is entirely contained in the installation folder.
Keep in mind that the install script was updated for yt 3.3 to build a conda environment by default. This makes the install script run much more quickly and is also more robust on most machines, particularly ones with old or nonexistent OpenSSL installs. If you want to make the install script build everything from source like it did for yt 3.1, set INST_YT_SOURCE=1 and INST_CONDA=0 in the install script.