Conference call notes 20170215

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Notes on the 70th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday February 15th 2017 (5pm - 6pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (7):

• Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
• Markus Geimer (JSC, Germany)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Bart Oldeman (McGill University, Canada)
• Robert Schmidt (OHRI, Canada)
• Davide Vanzo (Vanderbilt University)

Agenda

• short report on 2nd EasyBuild User Meeting
• sprint for easyconfigs using 2017a common toolchains
• Q&A

Notes

Report on 2nd EasyBuild User Meeting

• slides & recordings at https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild/wiki/2nd-EasyBuild-User-Meeting
• work on support for fat .yeb easyconfigs (Rob, Alan)
  • WIP branch: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/compare/develop...rjeschmi:fat-yaml
  • target example @ https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/compare/develop...rjeschmi:fat-yaml#diff-a17248dfd76e5068f1430b74dcab0811
  • move build specs deeper down to yeb parser
  • idea is to be able to parse fat .yeb and to specify which toolchain should be used via build specs (--toolchain=...)
  • problems: not complete yet (doesn't work yet), replacing of template values in PyYAML syntax, ...
  • other option: https://github.com/zerwes/hiyapyco YAML parser with Jinja support
  • may want to move away from current multiple document approach
  • support for making robot aware is kind of orthogonal (planned by Alan)
    • get this parsing support merged first, or not?
      • WIP PR coming up...
    • first approach would be to dump .eb easyconfigs from fat .yeb and make robot pick them up (first)
    • currently robot is blissfully unaware of .yeb easyconfigs anyway...
• fleshing out Tkinter from Python (Adam)
  • get rid of X11 dependency in Python
  • build Python without Tkinter support
  • install Tkinter module by redoing Python build and copying out _tkinter.so and set $PYTHONPATH so it's picked up
    • may require a custom easyblock for Tkinter rather than using EB_Python easyblock?
• more extensive module help output (Markus)
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/2113 (WIP PR)
  • see request for feedback on ML: https://www.mail-archive.com/easybuild@lists.ugent.be/msg03050.html
  • 'examples' as a separate easyconfig parameter, next to 'usage'?
  • long-term idea is to support templates for module files (via Jinja?)
    • but orthogonal to current work being done
• support for eb --try-dep-version (Damian, Victor, Guilherme)
  • merge of idea by Damian with that of CSCS
  • tweak version of a particular dependency (e.g. CMake) based on what already installed modules (idea Damian)
  • hard specify version for a particular dependency and generating a tweaked easyconfig if there's no match (idea CSCS)
  • both ideas could be merged via --try-dep-version=CMake,AVAILABLE, --try-dep-version=CMake,LATEST, --try-dep-version=CMake,3.8.0
  • implementation by Damian, tests by Victor
  • Damian: open issue with current idea
  • precursor to using https://github.com/release-monitoring/anitya to support updating dependencies to latest upstream version
• EasyBuild as a conda package (Jillian)
  • https://github.com/conda-forge/staged-recipes/pull/2391
• support for installing Octave extensions (toolboxes) (Lekshmi)
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/issues/4108
  • was more-or-less working at end of the hackathon based on existing OCamlPackage
  • PR for OctavePackage coming up?
  • tarballs needs to be executable for Octave to install... O_o
• MXnet support (Balazs)
  • current status: https://lists.ugent.be/wws/arc/easybuild/2017-02/msg00057.html
• SystemMPI easyblock (Alan)
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1106
  • supports only OpenMPI for now
• Tensorflow easyblock (Rob)
  • cfr. live coding during easyblock tutorial
  • Bazel PR by Rob: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/4114
  • see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/issues/4101
  • Davide: also GPU support?
  • see also work by CSCS: https://github.com/eth-cscs/production/tree/master/easybuild/easyconfigs/t/TensorFlow
  • also interest from Bart on testing/contributing
  • also comes back to fosscuda idea by Davide
    • fosscuda/2016b would have to stick o GCC 5.4 because of CUDA
    • would be quite close to foss in a hierarchical module setup
    • only GPU-specific stuff should go under fosscuda, rest can be inherited

Sprint for easyconfigs using 2017a common toolchains

• plan a particular day to only work on 2017a easyconfigs
• opportunity to also fix known issues, e.g. Tkinter in Python, plotting in R, ...
• Davide: please take into account https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/issues/4049

Other topics

• good way to determine list of available installed toolchains?

  • cfr. questions by Maxime: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/2118

• no support for Julia yet? (Bart)

  • see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/2162
  • got blocked by easyblock PR: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/499
  • Bart has an easyconfig that uses ConfigureMake (PR coming up)
  • requires some work to avoid requiring dependencies to be resolved by Nix
    • Rob: support for checking osdependencies also via Nix could be a good idea

• add support to EasyBuild for using remote easyconfig repositories

  • interest for larger sites with a custom repository (e.g., JSC, CSCS, ...)
  • plans by Victor (CSCS)