Conference call notes 20180117 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 94th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday January 17th 2018 (5pm - 6pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (8):

  • Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
  • Fotis Georgatos (Illumina, UK)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, University of Oxford)
  • Bart Oldeman (McGill University, Canada)
  • Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
  • Åke Sangren (Umeå University, Sweden)
  • Davide Vanzo (Vanderbilt University)

Agenda

  • EasyBuild v3.5.1
  • EasyBuild tutorial proposal for ISC'18
  • Q&A

Notes

EasyBuild v3.5.1
  • most significant changes
    • support for using Environment Modules v4.0 as modules tool
    • foss/2018a and intel/2018a toolchain definitions
    • RELEASE NOTES URL
  • release got blocked by major Travis outage
EasyBuild tutorial proposal for ISC'18
  • deadline: Feb 13th 2018 (may be extended)
  • based on SC17 tutorial proposal, which got very good reviews (but was not accepted...)
    • joint proposal with Lmod?
  • TODO:
    • get format right for ISC tutorial proposal
    • major point of criticism: lack of homogeneous material (slides)
      • also some remarks w.r.t. timing (ISC tutorials are 1h longer)
    • later also tutorial in readthedocs documentation
  • suggestion by Fotis: gitpitch (host slides in GitHub repo)
    • Markdown syntax
  • timeframe:
    • start looking at this week, progress during EasyBuild user meeting
Other
  • update on TensorFlow support

  • Markus: Qt 5.10

  • Markus: heterogeneous build of GCC

    • cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1336
    • libraries like GMP & co only used in frontend, not in runtime libraries
      • so disabling arch-specific optimisation would only affect compilation speed
    • only ISL is built manually in stage 2 of GCC installation, GMP & co are just provided to GCC build procedure as source tarballs
      • there may be some opportunity to build GMP libraries & co with arch-specific optimisations to speed up GCC compiler itself
        • but probably not worth the effort, performance gain for compilation would probably be marginal?
  • Damian: sharing installations in GCCcore across different systems (in the context of a module hierarchy)

    • implies using generic optimisations to allow using the software on systems with other architectures
    • requires that GCCcore installations can be done in a different installation prefix
      • modules that extend $MODULEPATH need to so with a path that depends on the system architecture
      • this could be done via symlinks?
    • Bart: already done in ComputeCanada, should sit together at EasyBuild User Meeting
      • some Lmod code added to iccifort module via modluafooter to make $MODULEPATH extension depend on architecture
    • Davide: same approach
    • it would be nice to include this in the documentation
      • Damian is going to takes notes during discussion