It is often possible to use other installations of JEDI dependencies installed for example with package managers like Homebrew (Mac) or available as native environment modules on HPC systems. However, this is not guaranteed to work and you may spend a lot of time debugging your configuration. Sometimes configuration options may be different. For example, in order to be usable with JEDI, netcdf needs to be built with fortran support and with parallel support.
For these reasons it is safer (and recommended) to use environment modules provided by JCSDA (available on many HPC systems used by our partner institutions) or to build the dependencies with the jedi-stack build system