Conference call notes 20170201 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 69th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday February 1st 2017 (5pm - 6pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (7):

  • Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
  • Markus Geimer (JSC, Germany)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
  • Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)
  • Shahzeb Siddiqui (Pfizer)
  • Bart Oldeman (McGill University, Canada)

Agenda

  • foss/2017a & intel/2017a toolchain definitions set in stone
  • EasyBuild v3.1.0 will be released later this week
  • performance issues of out-of-the-box MPI installations (& beyond)
  • Q&A

Notes

2017a toolchains
  • foss/2017a: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/3968
    • updated to use OpenMPI 2.0.2 & FFTW 3.3.6
    • Markus: two versions of M4/zlib uses in the full dep graph?
      • ...
    • Damian: pkg-config, Qt4, GLib (older version) fails to compile out-of-the-box with GCC 6.3
      • mostly due to changes of C++ standard (GCC 6.3 uses C++14 by default)
      • can be fixed using something like toolchainopts = {'cstd': 'gnu++98'} => g++ -std=gnu++98
      • pkg-config has a dedicated configure option --disable-compile-warnings
  • intel/2017a: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/3969
    • all done, on top of GCC 6.3.0 (same as in foss/2017a)
    • confirmed to work for HPL 2.2, CP2K 3.0, Python 2.7.12, Python 3.5.2, Perl 5.24.0, R/3.3.1
EasyBuild v3.1.0
Performance issues with out-of-the-box MPI installations
  • MPI installs done by non-admins using EB (cfr. post on mailing list)
    • without realising it requires further tuning/configuration
    • two aspects:
      • configuring via environment variables, quite site-specific
      • making sure right system libraries are used and pick up by the MPI installation
    • enforce specifying site-specific tweaking for certain stuff like OpenMPI?
      • and print a big ugly warning when nothing is specified at all...
        • could be part of sanity check?
      • this would require a good way to specify site-specific tweak in a separate file next to the easyconfig
      • e.g. for MPICH a detailed 'report' could be print at the sanity check
Other