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Conference call notes 20200527

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Kenneth Hoste edited this page May 27, 2020 · 3 revisions

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Notes on the 148th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday May 27th 2020 (15:00 UTC - 17:00 CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (13):

  • Simon Branford (University of Birmingham, UK)
  • Fotis Georgatos (SDSC, Switzerland)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, Oxford, UK)
  • Terje Kvernes (University of Oslo, Norway)
  • Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
  • Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
  • Bart Oldeman (ComputeCanada)
  • Victor Holanda Rusu (CSCS, Switzerland)
  • Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)
  • Jörg Saßmannshausen (NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, UK)
  • Alexandre Strube (JSC, Germany)
  • Lars Viklund (Umeå University, Sweden)

Agenda

Recent developments

  • EasyBuild v4.2.1 was released last week (May 27th)

    • merged shortly before release:
      • framework
        • fix for Java wrappers in HMNS (PR #3337)
        • style cleanup in easybuild.tools (PR #3282)
        • support for copying tweaked easyconfig with --copy-ec (PR #3332)
      • easyblocks
        • let CMakeMake remove 'easybuild_obj' build directory if it already exists (PR #2032)
        • rewrite GROMACS easyblock to build all four variations in the same build (PR #1991)
        • update config.guess for all R packages (PR #1949)
        • fix for --module-only for GCC (PR #2059)
      • easyconfigs
        • (nothing shocking)

  • recent changes

    • framework
      • fix for broken Singularity container recipes (PR #3347)
      • develop was broken for a couple of hours due to changes in PR #3344, fixed in PR #3345
        • slipped through due to incomplete test coverage
    • easyblocks
    • easyconfigs
      • avoid MPI_Init on 'import h5py' (PR #10687)

EasyBuild tutorial

  • date set: Tue June 23rd 2020 (afternoon)
  • half-day tutorial (remote)
    • pretty much what was accepted for ISC'20 (postponed to ISC'21)
  • tutorial is being prepared at https://github.com/boegel/easybuild-tutorial
  • incl. hands-on exercises
    • installation & configuration of EasyBuild
    • basic usage of eb CLI
    • writing easyconfigs for prepared toy software packages:
      • library (ConfigureMake)
      • C++ app (CMakeMake), which depends on the library
      • Python package (stand-alone + as extension)
  • controlled tutorial environment:
    • Docker (& Singularity?) container with CentOS 7 + foss/2020a + Python 3 software stack pre-installed
    • VMs on AWS for tutorial attendees (just to run Docker container)

Policy on Conda package contributions

  • question by Mikael
  • example PR: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/9778
  • several reasons to not merge PRs like these:
    • can't guarantee that these easyconfigs will keep working
    • generically optimized binaries :(
    • but how much effort is required to do this "properly"?
  • Terje: why do people even want to use EasyBuild to install conda packages?

OpenMPI/UCX/PMIx presentation

  • date set: Wed June 24th 2020 (5pm CEST)
    • replaces EasyBuild conf call
  • remote presentation (via WebEx), recorded (will be uploaded to YouTube)
  • presenters: Jeff Squyres (Cisco, Open MPI) & Ralph Castain (PMIx)
  • topics: Open MPI (MCA, MTL, ...) & related libraries (UCX, PMI, PMIx, PSM, PSM2, verbs, libfabric/OFI), integration with Slurm, CUDA, etc.

Q&A

  • Alexandre: fosscuda/2020a?
    • waiting for new CUDA release that supports GCC 9.3
  • Mikael: let bot submit output of eb --review-pr into PR itself?
    • amount of easyconfigs we compare with should be limited
    • also add labels automatically by bot for unlabeled PRs
  • Mikael: Mesa is/was not compatible with GPU drivers, what's the current situation (does vglrun work)?
    • Åke: recent versions should be better w.r.t. vendor neutral dispatch (glvnd)?
    • Terje was GPU login nodes, but Mesa isn't used a lot there
      • already running CentOS 8/RHEL 8, which may help with this
    • Mikael: used to be true to filter out Mesa/libGLU to actually get things working (and build against system Nvidia libs instead)
      • affected ParaView/VTK for sure
    • Alan has asked JSC colleagues to open PR to get proper OpenGL support in EB
  • Mikael: time to add more maintainers?
  • Victor: Open MPI talk will be public?
  • Jörg: more info on Singularity changes?
  • Mikael: time to get rid of Travis?
    • currently only for:
      • running tests with Python 2.6
      • comment made by @boegelbot for adding comment with info on failing tests
    • so, disable requirement for tests to pass in Travis CI, which is good enough short term
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