Conference call notes 20200205

(back to Conference calls)

Notes on the 141st EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Feb 5th 2020 (17:00 - 18:30 CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (10):

• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Victor Holanda Rusu (CSCS, Switzerland)
• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Lars Viklund (Umeå University, Sweden)
• Oriol Mula (HPCNow!)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Alexander Strube (JSC, Germany)
• Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, UK)
• Bart Oldeman (ComputeCanada)
• Caspar Van Leeuwen (SURFsara, Netherlands)

Agenda

• support for tweaking of dependency versions (as discussed at EUM'20)
• setting up an easyconfigs sprint for common dependencies in 2020a toolchains
• better documentation for easyblocks
• how can we tighten the feedback loop between contributors & maintainers/MotW?
• conf calls at different times (for different timezones)?
• Q&A

Tweaked dependency versions

• based on presentation prepared by Caspar
  • --try-software-version & --try-toolchain-version sort of work (but can't be combined)
  • no way yet to tweak dependency version though...
• see also Alan's old PR (https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/2599)
  • --try-update-deps takes into account existing easyconfigs to bump dep versions (or creates missing easyconfigs if they're missing)
  • having the possibility to overrule with specific versions (like in Caspar's proposal) could make sense
• wish list of dependencies for 2020a made at SURFsara
  • --tweak-deps would take the list of dep versions and generate easyconfigs for it
  • should we also worry about versionsuffix?
  • step-wise implementation, make it experimental initially (freedom to change logic/default behavior)
• Bart: https://github.com/ComputeCanada/easybuild-computecanada-config/blob/master/cc_hooks.py
  • hook used at ComputeCanada with manually maintained list of dep versions
  • doesn't generate required easyconfigs to resolve those dependencies, expected to be there already
• Victor: bumping of toolchains & versions is now done with a script outside of EasyBuild
  • implemented by Eirini
  • currently not available publicly (yet)
• Alan: dumping of easyconfigs is known not to be perfect
  • sometimes too aggressive w.r.t. resolving of template values
  • shouldn't be impossible to fix

Better documentation for easyblocks

• based on presentation by Caspar
• suggestion by Alexander (@Flamefire) to document easyblock behavior better in docstrings per step
• "eb --easyblock-help" => Caspar will work on this

Tighter feedback loop between contributors & maintainers?

• set a date to have a focused effort for 2020a toolchains
• get working easyconfigs for most common dependencies
• maybe even consider toolchain definition as a part of that effort, so it can be revised if needed
  • e.g. which Python 3 version do we pick, etc.
• current plan for 2020a:
  • foss: GCC 9.2 + OpenMPI 4.0.3
    • hopefully also a new release of OpenBLAS (we should ping the OpenBLAS developers on that...)
  • intel: 2020 initial release for compilers

Conf calls in different time zones?

• 5pm CET (once a month)
• 10am CET (once a month)
• 3am CET (once a month, hosted by Miguel?)
• doodle for ML & Slack

Q&A

• Mikael: has anyone looked at alternatives for OpenBLAS? BLIS?
  • Bart: BLIS seems to be within 95% of MKL in terms of performance