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Conference call notes 20141128

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boegel edited this page Nov 26, 2014 · 5 revisions

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Notes on the 21st EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday November 28th 2014 (3.00pm - 3.30pm CET)

Attendees

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)

Agenda

  • overview of EasyBuild events and discussions at SC14 (Petar, Jens)

Notes

overview of EasyBuild events and discussions at SC14

  • most people already knew about EasyBuild & Lmod

    • interest by several commercial companies in Lmod

  • lots of 'grumpy Jims', small sites drowning in work

  • 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?

  • 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

  • EasyBuild & Lmod were promoted by Olli-Pekka (CSC, Finland) at (private) Cray meeting

Other topics

  • 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

  • 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
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