Conference call notes 20151125

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Notes on the 40th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday November 25th 2015 (5.15pm - 5.45pm CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (6):

• Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
• Fotis Georgatos (freelancer)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Lumír Jasiok (IIT4Innovations, Czech Republic)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Martin Stachon (IIT4Innovations, Czech Republic)

Agenda

• report on 10th EasyBuild hackathon and SC15 news/activities
• discussing the issues related to supporting the 2016 versions of the Intel compilers/libraries
• open Q&A

Notes

report on 10th EasyBuild hackathon and SC15 news/activities

• EasyBuild & Spack
  • plans to work on common base library (WIP name 'depdag') with support for Spack-style of specifying dependency graph
  • Spack also defines a DAG specification in YAML; can serve as inspiration for EasyBuild .yeb format, or maybe even lead to a common format?
  • Lumír: support for rpath-style linking also very interesting
    • way in which Spack supports rpath-style linking can serve as guide for rpath support in EasyBuild
  • consider relicensing easyblocks (and framework) to LGPL, to enable two-way collaboration with Spack community
• OpenHPC: http://openhpc.community
  • features both EasyBuild & Lmod (although neither of the respective communities were aware...)
  • not 100% clear what the intention is
  • Kenneth: now mainly serves as catalogue of established tools in HPC community?
• issues with getting Intel tools installed
  • Kenneth: discussion started with Intel @ SC15 exhibit, several points of contact in Intel we can try to involve in follow-up
  • Lumír has looked into problems too, production installations in place
  • problems when combining recent Intel compilers with GCC v5.x
  • problems due to repackaging, (too) fat installs, should be trimmed down
  • overall picture is still unclear...
  • set up separate conf call on this? (Kenneth will send out doodle to ML to plan this)
• problems with system GCC being picked up by MPI compiler wrappers rather than GCC included in toolchain? (Lumír, Martin)
  • Alan: seems related to previous problems with Intel MPI compiler wrappers not picking up the right compiler (icc vs gcc, etc.)
  • see set_mpi_wrapper_aliases_gcc and set_mpi_wrapper_* easyconfig parameters supported by impi easyblock
  • an issue (framework or easyblocks) should be opened to figure out the problems and work out solutions
• (possible) future EasyBuild events
  • EasyBuild User Meeting in Ghent (Jan'16) + FOSDEM HPC & Big Data devroom
    • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild/wiki/1st-EasyBuild-User-Meeting
    • http://hpc-bigdata-fosdem16.github.io
  • EasyBuild hackathon @ CSCS (Lugano) March'16, conjoined with HPC Advisory Council meeting (http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/2016/swiss-workshop/)
  • EasyBuild a Cray User Group (London) May'16 (https://cug.org/CUG2016)?
  • EasyBuild @ ISC'16?
• interest by both Intel and Cray, conf calls (being) planned by Kenneth
  • Intel: group that is responsible for Intel Python Distribution (https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-distribution-for-python)
  • Cray: interesting from group of people responsible for Cray Programming Environment
• adoption of EasyBuild & Lmod by Bright
  • Bright Computing is actively looking into including EasyBuild in their environment, and switching to Lmod as the default modules tool
  • some incompatibilities with Tcl/C environment modules are preventing them from making a quick switch
  • Fotis is helping out with reporting problems and figuring out solutions
• Alan: roadmap for EasyBuild v2.5.0
  • Kenneth: before end of the year, most likely by Dec 16th