Conference call notes 20160427

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Notes on the 50th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday April 27th 2016 (5pm - 5.30pm CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (8):

• Damian Alvarez Mallon (JSC, Germany)
• Fotis Georgatos (Illumina, UK)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
• Adam Huffman (Francis Crick Institute, UK)
• Gizo Nanava (Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• David Ramírez (HPCsia, Spain)
• Robert Schmidt (OHRI, Canada)

Agenda

• ongoing switch from Jenkins to Travis as infrastructure for testing
• 'module use' PR (https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1735)
• Q&A

Notes

• welcoming two newcomers: David & Gizo, been looking into EasyBuild in last couple of weeks

• transition to Travis:

  • examples:
    • https://travis-ci.org/hpcugent/easybuild-framework
    • https://travis-ci.org/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull_requests
  • PRs are currently being tested with both Jenkins and Travis
  • idea is to switch to only Travis in the coming weeks
  • no more notifications through comments for failing/successful tests
    • mainly an issue for release manager?

• limiting ModulesTool instances being created results in significant speedup

  • framework tests runs 2x faster
  • dry run with --minimal-toolchains and HMNS is ~2x faster
  • follow-up to also tackle abundance of module avail: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/1739

• PGI support: roadmap @ https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild/issues/211

  • Rob: up for testing
  • Damian: using PGI (+MVAPICH2 2.2b GDR) has worked out quite well (HDF5, netCDF (serial + parallel), ...)
    • problem with building GMP with PGI, requires precise
      • Kenneth: use strict instead?

• Adam: PRs for older versions of software of any use?

  • Kenneth: sure!

• Damian: build deps are not loaded when installing extensions?!

  • ld.gold was being picked up from system during installation of Perl modules
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/1741

• Fotis: module use gets undone when new bash shell is started on some systems, because /etc/profile.d script is hard redefining $MODULEPATH

  • to try and reproduce:
    • module use /tmp/modules
    • echo $MODULEPATH
    • bash
    • echo $MODULEPATH

• Fotis: defining $MODULEPATH based on group membership?

  • Alan: yes, this is done at JSC, via profile script
  • Fotis: relying on id?
  • Alan: performance issues when 'module use/unuse' is used
  • (taken 'offline')

• Gizo: use of group easyconfig parameter, what's the need for the os.setgid call in use_group function?

  • group ownership is also correct without the os.setgid call, so why is it needed?
  • currently use of newgrp is enforced, but this resets the environment, and thus potentially undoes part of EasyBuild configuration

• Gizo: --subdir-user-modules doesn't work as intended? no documentation available?