Conference call notes 20190918

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Notes on the 132nd EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Sep 18th 2019 (17:00 - 18:00 CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (6):

• Markus Geimer (Jülich Supercomputing Centre)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
• Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, Oxford)
• Hugo Meilan (Microsoft HPC)
• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Davide Vanzo (Vanderbilt University, USA)

Agenda

• update on 2019b common toolchains
• update on progress towards EasyBuild 4.0
• Q&A

2019b common toolchains

• both foss/2019b and intel/2019b are set in stone
  • see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/8567 and https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/8681
  • foss/2019b
    • GCC 8.3.0 + binutils 2.32
    • Open MPI 3.1.4
    • OpenBLAS 0.3.7 (+ ScaLAPACK 2.0.2)
    • FFTW 3.3.8
  • intel/2019b
    • (base: GCC 8.3.0 + binutils 2.32)
    • iccfort 2019 update 5 (2019.5.281)
    • impi 2018 update 5 (2018.5.288)
      • not 2019 update 5 because of segmentation faults issue on Intel Skylake in cgroup environment
      • apparently impi 2019.x should (still) not be considered stable?
    • imkl 2019 update 5 (2019.5.281)
  • no more GCC/binutils version in versionsuffix
  • both will be included with EasyBuild v4.0 release
  • also: updated easyconfigs for Perl, Python (2.7.16 & 3.7.4), X11, ...
  • Davide: was already using OpenMPI 3.1.4 in foss/2019a because of spurious errors confusing users

EasyBuild 4.0

• https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild/issues/447
• ETA: this week?
• all PRs targeted for this release have been merged
  • framework: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/milestone/64?closed=1
  • easyblocks: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/milestone/55?closed=1
  • easyconfigs: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/milestone/58?closed=1
• recent developments:
  • 2019b update of common toolchains
  • no more setuptools required for installing EasyBuild
  • custom easyblock for OpenMPI
    • should be more verbose about not enabled IB support...
  • overview of major changes documented at https://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/develop/EasyBuild4-overview-of-changes.html
  • extensive testing with EasyBuild on top of Python 3(.6)
  • minor bug fixes that were uncovered thanks to regtest
• regression test in under way (no serious problems found so far that would block release)
• TODO:
  • regression test (WIP)
  • compose release notes (already WIP)
  • update bootstrap script to support installing EasyBuild v4.0

Q&A

• Davide: problems with impi 2018.x with UCX
  • suggestion by Intel was to use latest impi 2019
• Markus: OpenMPI 4.0.1 w/ UCX
  • use case: test suite of Scalasca tool (40-50 short MPI jobs in single job)
  • occasional issues when launching MPI calculations in Slurm jobs
    • Kenneth: error messages?
  • Davide: only known issues with 3.1.4