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Notes on the 21st EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday November 28th 2014 (3.00pm - 3.30pm CET)
Alphabetical list of attendees (7):
- Petar Forai (GMI, Austria)
- Fotis Georgatos (freelancer)
- Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
- Ward Poelmans (UGent, Belgium)
- Robert McLay (TACC, US)
- Olav Smørholm (University of Warwick, UK)
- Jens Timmerman (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
- overview of EasyBuild events and discussions at SC14 (Petar, Jens)
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most people already knew about EasyBuild & Lmod
- interest by several commercial companies in Lmod
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lots of 'grumpy Jims', small sites drowning in work
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excellent talk by Markus at HUST14
- quite a bit of discussion afterwards
- post-talk questions (thanks Robert for keeping track):
- How to install w/ EasyBuild where you have local disks?
- How to build the next version when you get a new compiler version?
- Software vendors should support these tools?
- Does Lmod support Tcl modules?
- A comment about Lmod at PNL
- Is there way for EasyBuild to install Intel?
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alternative tool: Spack
- has nice features: advanced dependency handling support, powerful command line
- now also supports generating module files
- merge between EasyBuild and Spack should be discussed again with Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
- licensing allows merging Spack (LGPL) into EasyBuild (GPLv2) already
- one way may be to host both tools in a single repository, and merge gradually
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EasyBuild & Lmod were promoted by Olli-Pekka (CSC, Finland) at (private) Cray meeting
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next EasyBuild release?
- EasyBuild v1.16 mid-December 2014
- delayed due to revamped EasyBuild documentation, SC14, HPC-UGent site maintenance, etc.
- will support disabling deprecated behaviour, to prepare for EasyBuild v2.0 (1st release of 2015)
- issues uncovered during 2-day hackathon at JSC in Oct'14 should be mostly fixed
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Lmod plans
- the open 'matrix' problem
- multiple parents in a hierarchy (e.g., OpenBLAS vs Intel MKL)
- gets even more complex with BLAS+FFTW (1 parent with Intel MKL, two parents with OpenBLAS/FFTW)
- solution @ TACC for now is to use Rpath rather than prereqs
- basically a graph problem, so talk to someone doing graph research?
- dynamic path search in a multi-dimensional graph with limited visibility
- talk to Todd about this, since he has advanced dependency resolution support in Spack
- take a look at how dependencies are handled in Debian
- talk to Stefano Zacchiroli?
- Debian project lead, led the effort behind CUDF, project Mancoosi
- may be attending FOSDEM
- talk to Stefano Zacchiroli?
- multiple parents in a hierarchy (e.g., OpenBLAS vs Intel MKL)
- the open 'matrix' problem