Conference call notes 20160706

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Notes on the 55th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday July 6th 2016 (5pm - 5.30pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (6):

• Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
• Pablo Escobar (sciCORE, UniBas, Switzerland)
• Markus Geimer (JSC, Germany)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Robert Schmidt (OHRI, Canada)

Agenda

• update on next EasyBuild release (v2.8.2)
• discussion on EasyBuild in OpenHPC & Intel HPC Orchestrator
• jhbuild for X11 software stack
• Q&A

Notes

EasyBuild v2.8.2

• still WIP, mostly bug fixes
• also support for auto-generating documentation, e.g.:
  • http://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/develop/api/easybuild.tools.filetools.html
  • http://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/develop/version-specific/Generic_easyblocks.html
• WIP release notes: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/compare/develop...boegel:eb282

OpenHPC

• EasyBuild is now also part
• better integration with OpenHPC provided compilers/MPI library packages via external modules
  • cfr. http://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Using_external_modules.html

jhbuild

• https://developer.gnome.org/jhbuild/stable/
• used by GNOME & Qt
• X-desktop: ~250 packages
• by default: installs latest master branch of all packages
  • but can also specify specific date
  • still vulnerable to build issues
  • several dates tried by Alan, only 20151231 really worked (243 packages)
• supports blacklisting of packages
• will require a custom easyblock
  • 'special' download step
  • custom config file
• also supports pre-downloading sources (nobuild in config file)
• check with jhbuild community if installs can be done version-locked, i.e. with proper releases
• pkgconfig should also be added as a build dep
• see also recent PR by Ward on fixing lots of (build) dep issues: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/3222

Q&A

• Markus: support for Lmod family/properties
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1257
  • still on the 'roadmap', may be finished soon-ish
  • workaround for now is to use luafooter
• Markus: issues with --try-* and --job
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/1475 is different issue than https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/1438
• Markus: using of modules for system tools in different location than EB install prefix?
  • should work fine
  • for HMNS, you should use --subdir-user-modules to properly extend $MODULEPATH
• Markus: support for hiding toolchains
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1683
  • converged on a good solution?
  • should robot always consider hidden module as a fallback when resolving deps?
  • summary:
    • add support for hidden = True in easyconfig files (equivalent to --hidden)
    • add support for hiding toolchain (via --hide-deps and listing toolchain in hiddendependencies)
    • make robot consider hidden modules as fallback when resolving deps (and make it configurable)
      • find_resolved_modules in robot.py
• Damian: CEA.fr is also using EasyBuild
  • they have a wrapper to decouple app from MPI runtime: e.g. Intel MPI vs OpenMPI
  • can help with having a single installation, compatible with different MPI stacks
    • => basically remove one level of the hierarchy
  • compatible with MPI 1.3, MPI 2 support by Sept
  • open source soon?
  • performance impact? no real numbers yet
  • probably higher impact on calls with small message sizes (increases latency)