Conference call notes 20180117

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Notes on the 94th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday January 17th 2018 (5pm - 6pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (8):

• Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
• Fotis Georgatos (Illumina, UK)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, University of Oxford)
• Bart Oldeman (McGill University, Canada)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Åke Sangren (Umeå University, Sweden)
• Davide Vanzo (Vanderbilt University)

Agenda

• EasyBuild v3.5.1
• EasyBuild tutorial proposal for ISC'18
• Q&A

Notes

EasyBuild v3.5.1

• most significant changes
  • support for using Environment Modules v4.0 as modules tool
  • foss/2018a and intel/2018a toolchain definitions
  • RELEASE NOTES URL
• release got blocked by major Travis outage
  • see https://www.traviscistatus.com/incidents/c1s4dlyxd4lf
  • issues are now fixed, EasyBuild v3.5.1 to be released later today...

EasyBuild tutorial proposal for ISC'18

• deadline: Feb 13th 2018 (may be extended)
• based on SC17 tutorial proposal, which got very good reviews (but was not accepted...)
  • joint proposal with Lmod?
• TODO:
  • get format right for ISC tutorial proposal
  • major point of criticism: lack of homogeneous material (slides)
    • also some remarks w.r.t. timing (ISC tutorials are 1h longer)
  • later also tutorial in readthedocs documentation
• suggestion by Fotis: gitpitch (host slides in GitHub repo)
  • Markdown syntax
• timeframe:
  • start looking at this week, progress during EasyBuild user meeting

Other

• update on TensorFlow support

  • easyblock https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1287
  • CPU-only easyconfig: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/5499
    • should only need to add CUDA + cuDNN in dependencies
  • check again with EB v3.5.1 (has fixes for CUDA CUPTI)
  • interested: @fgeorgatos, @damianam, @akesandgren

• Markus: Qt 5.10

  • changed configuration procedure?
  • updated Qt easyblock https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1328, works with Qt 5.9
  • consider switching to non-interactive configuration for Qt5?

• Markus: heterogeneous build of GCC

  • cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1336
  • libraries like GMP & co only used in frontend, not in runtime libraries
    • so disabling arch-specific optimisation would only affect compilation speed
  • only ISL is built manually in stage 2 of GCC installation, GMP & co are just provided to GCC build procedure as source tarballs
    • there may be some opportunity to build GMP libraries & co with arch-specific optimisations to speed up GCC compiler itself
      • but probably not worth the effort, performance gain for compilation would probably be marginal?

• Damian: sharing installations in GCCcore across different systems (in the context of a module hierarchy)

  • implies using generic optimisations to allow using the software on systems with other architectures
  • requires that GCCcore installations can be done in a different installation prefix
    • modules that extend $MODULEPATH need to so with a path that depends on the system architecture
    • this could be done via symlinks?
  • Bart: already done in ComputeCanada, should sit together at EasyBuild User Meeting
    • some Lmod code added to iccifort module via modluafooter to make $MODULEPATH extension depend on architecture
  • Davide: same approach
    • problems with GCC built on Haswell to use on Westmere
    • should be fixed by updated GCC easyblock @ https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1336?
    • would like to join discussion @ EUM remotely
  • it would be nice to include this in the documentation
    • Damian is going to takes notes during discussion