Conference call notes 20200401

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Notes on the 144th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Apr 1st 2020 (16:00 UTC - 17:00 UTC)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (10):

• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
• John Dey (Fred Hutch, Seattle, US)
• Alex Domingo (ULB, Belgium)
• Victor Rusu (CSCS, Switzerland)
• Alexandre Strube (JSC, Germany)
• Maxime Boissonneault (ComputeCanada)
• Valentin (University of Luxembourg)
• Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, Oxford, UK)
• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Bart Oldeman (Compute Canada)

Agenda

• overview of recent changes, outlook to next release
• update on 2020a update for common toolchains
• Q&A

Overview of recent changes

• updated release (v4.2.0) ETA: next week...
• framework: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/milestone/75
  • recently merged PRs:
    • avoid that GitHub token leaks into local temporary debug logs (PR #3248)
    • locking feature (PR #3009)
    • bug fix for --copy-ec (PR #3262)
    • determine CPU arch name via archspec (PR #3227)
    • fix reporting with --skip (PR #3254)
    • TODO:
      • support for %(mpi_cmd_prefix)s template (PR #3264)
      • Alan's PR for --try-update-deps (PR #2599)
• easyblocks: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/milestone/64
  • custom easyblock for Mesa (PR #1892)
  • cleanup for CMakeMake-based easyblocks (PR #1929)
  • TODO:
    • enable out-of-tree build by default in CMakeMake (PR #1933)
    • update config.guess for R packages (PR #1949)
• easyconfigs: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/milestone/67
  • ...

Update on 2020a common toolchains

• see project dashboard: , and see also the 2020a branch and milestone
• foss/2020a
  • GCC 9.3.0 + binutils 2.34
  • OpenMPI 4.0.3
  • OpenBLAS 0.3.9 (updated recently, see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/10292)
  • ScaLAPACK 2.1.0
  • FFTW 3.3.8
• intel/2020a
  • based on GCC 9.3.0 + binutils 2.34
  • planning to update to iccifort/imkl 2020 update 1 + impi 2019 update 7, see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/10295
  • iccifort 2020.1.217 (a.k.a. 2020 update 1, v19.1.1)
  • impi 2019.7.217
  • imkl 2020.1.217
• not compatible CUDA yet, so fosscuda/2020a on hold
• TODO:
  • more testing with (updated) intel/2020a
  • are we happy with impi 2019 update 7?
    • Alex: 2019 update 6 works in Torque with UCX 1.7
      • better perf with 2019 update 6 than with intel/2019b
      • 2019 update 7 yields more problems, can't get it to work at all...
        • different UCX, upstream libfabric, ... all fails (inter-node)
        • single node works with some providers
  • re-test foss/2020a after update to OpenBLAS 0.3.9
  • collapse 2020a branch into develop (after v4.2.0 release?)
  • potential way forward is to only collapse foss/2020a into develop

Q&A

• Victor: picking up environment variables to provide metadata
  • https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/3174
• Victor: update on support for updating deps from eb CLI?
  • only Alan's --try-update-deps PR for now, based on available easyconfig files
• Victor: automatically create easyconfigs for new toolchain versions
  • new MVAPICH2 version should trigger update of gmvapich/gmvolf
  • Alexandre: also interest from JSC for this
  • both to generate easyconfigs for toolchains & dependencies
  • focus on MPICH at CSCS because of compatibility with Cray MPI, similar story for JSC
• Victor: update on containers support in EasyBuild?
  • John Dey is using (Docker) containers built with EasyBuild
    • goal is to have application-only containers (e.g. Bowtie, etc.)
  • Victor: CSCS has a script that only copies the stuff that is needed for runtime
    • works well with Spack which supports RUNPATH
      • so $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is still taken into account
      • also works with MPI OCI hooks
    • EasyBuild doesn't support using RUNPATH currently
    • similar thing can be done with only $LD_LIBRARY_PATH and ldd
    • GROMACS container can be trimmed down from 4-5GB to ~200MB
    • not available publicly, but can be shared with others
  • Mikael: providing software via CVMFS is another way of making installations available everywhere?