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Conference call notes 20140805

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Kenneth Hoste edited this page Aug 5, 2014 · 1 revision

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Notes on the 15th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday August 5th 2014 (3.15pm - 3.45pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (5):

  • Xavier Besseron (University of Luxembourg)
  • Petar Forai (GMI, Austria)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Ward Poelmans (UGent, Belgium)
  • Olav Smørholm (University of Warwick, UK)

Agenda

  • EasyBuild v1.15 release planning (Kenneth)
  • improvements w.r.t. using a dummy/system toolchain (Petar)
  • status update of support for hierarchical modules (Kenneth + anyone who has played around with it)

Notes

Release planning
Lua module file support
  • support for Lua module files in the works by Petar
  • no notion of conflict in Lua module files?
  • ask Robert for Lua module file template
System compiler (a.k.a. dummy)
  • 'dummy' doesn't really make sense, needs to be better documented
  • better name name would be system, should be equivalent to dummy with an empty version (so dependencies are being loaded)
  • some easyblocks will suffer from this, since they rely on e.g. self.toolchain.comp_family(), mpi_family(), etc.
  • another (better?) alternative is let EasyBuild install modules that simply wrap system tools
    • we need a System (generic) easyblock that can be used to generate modules for system tools (e.g. GCC, OpenMPI, BLAS/LAPACK libraries, etc.) => Xavier?
      • make eb generate a module file, that can then be used as (part of) a toolchain
      • should simply allow for specifying installation paths (for $PATH, $CPATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.)
      • should maybe also support verifying whether the specified version is correct (e.g. check gcc -V vs specified version)?
Support for hierarchical module naming schemes: status
  • API for custom module naming schemes was enhanced in EasyBuild v1.14.0
    • module name is split up into subdirectory in $MODULEPATH (e.g. Core) and 'short' module name (e.g. GCC/4.8.3)
    • include notion of module path extensions
    • support for inspecting the toolchain, e.g. which compilers, MPI are included in it
    • toolchains can be hidden from users by requesting to not include module load <toolchain> statements in generated module files
      • instead, module load statements are included for the different toolchain elements
      • this makes a lot of sense in the context of a hierarchy, to avoid useless module files polluting the tree
  • Apps vs Core for application modules; how to avoid dependency conflicts for 'core' application modules?
  • issue a request for feedback on EasyBuild mailing list on support for hierarchical modules?
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