Conference call notes 20200610

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Notes on the 149th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday June 10 2020 (08:00 UTC - 10:00 CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (5):

• Simon Branford (University of Birmingham, UK)
• Victor Holanda Rusu (CSCS, Switzerland)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)

Agenda

• recent developments (merged PRs)
• update on EasyBuild tutorial on Tue June 23rd
• OpenMPI/UCX/PMIx presentation on Wed June 24th
• Q&A

Recent developments

• ETA for next release (probably EasyBuild v4.2.2): end of June/early July
• project to track issues/PRs that should be tackled for this release: https://github.com/orgs/easybuilders/projects/6
  • to maintainers: please add important issues/PRs into this project (bug fixes, specific enhancements/updates)
• recent changes
  • framework
    • support for using self.cfg.update for dict-valued easyconfig parameters (#3356)
  • easyblocks
    • custom easyblock for installing XALT (PR #1942)
      • Victor: impossible to upgrade XALT in place with this approach (--with-siteControlledPrefix=yes)
      • which you really want to do to ensure binaries that hardcode location to XALT get bug fixes + enhancements
      • see also https://github.com/eth-cscs/production/blob/master/easybuild/easyblocks/xalt.py
      • please open an issue for this, tag Scott + Robert in it
    • bug fix + enhancement for Trilinos easyblock (PR #2071)
    • fix for PythonBundle when using system Python (PR #2075)
  • easyconfigs
    • remove hardcoded for x86 in LLVM easyconfigs (PR #10677)
    • ReFrame 3.0 (PR #10754)
    • XALT 2.8.4 (PR #9792)
    • Trilinos with foss/2019b (PR #10718)
    • IPython 7.15.0 with foss/2020a (PR #19727)
• PRs/issues of interest (hopefully to be merged soon)
  • framework
    • support for using sources (incl. git_config) for extensions (PR #3294, fixes issue #3251) + accompanying docs update (PR #617)
    • fixes for --try-update-deps (PRs #3353, #3350)
    • hang triggered by easyconfigs index? (issue #3360)
  • easyblocks
    • fix for OpenCV to support non-Intel builds (PR #2056)
    • fix issues with latest Qt5 (issue #2076)
  • easyconfigs
    • avoid excessive parallelism during PyTorch installation (PR #10772)
    • FEniCS with foss/2019b (PR #10719)
    • CP2K 7.1 (PR #10714)
• we should also clean up the 2020a branch, and get it completely collapsed into develop
  • something for MotW to look into?
  • see also issue #10753

EasyBuild tutorial

• Tue June 23rd 2020, 1pm-6pm CEST
• remote tutorial (remote)
  • pretty much what was accepted for ISC'20 (postponed to ISC'21)
• tutorial is still being prepared
  • preview at https://boegel.github.io/easybuild-tutorial
  • plan is to move this to easybuilders GitHub org later
  • also integrate it with EasyBuild documentation
• Docker container has been prepared for hands-on
  • includes small foss/2020a-based software stack in /easybuild, incl. EasyBuild, Python 3, SciPy-bundle, HDF5
  • see https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/easybuilders/tutorial/general
  • using Docker: docker run -ti --rm easybuilders/tutorial:isc20-haswell
  • using Singularity: singularity run --cleanenv --home /tmp/$USER/isc20 docker://easybuilders/tutorial:isc20-haswell
• registration via https://webappsx.ugent.be/eventManager/events/ebtutorial
• which platform?
  • Zoom in webinar?
  • Zoom supports streaming to YouTube (20sec delay)
    • Alan could get delay down to ~3s by streaming via OBS

OpenMPI/UCX/PMIx presentation

• Wed June 24th 2020 at 5pm CEST
• see EasyBuild Tech Talks I: Open MPI for more information
• re-schedule next conf call at 3pm CEST June 24th?

Q&A

• Terje: Are the Intel compiler licenses becoming very expensive for people?
  • Mikael: paying similar price as before currently for 3y?
  • Simon: want to check, but info is in the office :-/
  • mostly paying for Intel Fortran + Intel MPI (worth it?)
  • Fortran compiler will be included in next Clang
  • we need to re-evaluate the Intel oneAPI beta releases?
• would be interesting to leverage ReFrame for performance tests
  • and make it part of of uploaded test reports in easyconfig PRs
  • Victor: CSCS is working on regression suite using ReFrame + EasyBuild
  • major improvement in ReFrame 3.0 is making it easier to use other people's tests