Conference call notes 20181128 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 115th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Nov 28th 2018 (17:00 - 18:00 CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (8):

  • Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
  • Victor Holanda (CSCS, Switzerland)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, UK)
  • Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
  • Bart Oldeman (ComputeCanada)
  • Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)
  • Davide Vanzo (Vanderbilt University, US)

Agenda

  • updates on upcoming EasyBuild v3.8.0
  • deprecating of old toolchains: ictce, goolf + oldest intel toolchains
  • Q&A

Outlook to EasyBuild v3.8.0

deprecating of old toolchains: ictce, goolf + oldest intel toolchains

Other

  • EUM19: https://tiny.cc/eum19
    • OpenHPC, Singularity 3.0, RAPIDS.ai, Spack (remote), Lmod/XALT (remote), Bazel, ReFrame, CK (https://github.com/ctuning/ck), ...
      • @boegel could ask at TF SIG Build w.r.t. talk about Bazel at EUM
  • MotW planning for Dec: doodle is due!
  • Davide: how to work around version conflicts for 2017b/2018a easyconfigs
    • pain is caused by combo of using GCCcore 6.4.0 in both 2017b/2018a + not having dep variant check for 2017b toolchain generation
    • mostly occurs when adding missing dependencies
    • static (build) dependencies don't always work
    • hard to fix historic mistakes, should be a lot less frequent going forward thanks to enhanced checks
  • Davide: problems when building GROMACS with intelcuda
    • nvcc picks up $CFLAGS together with g++ (after it tried with icpc but failed to use it)
    • Davide will reach out to Åke on this
    • fixed in magma (cfr. ) through patch by telling nvcc to use g++ + GCC flags
    • telling nvcc to use icpc/icc doesn't work because of it missing __float128 symbols
    • Åke: see also https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-c-compiler/topic/742701 (but that was for Float128)
    • Alan: can be fixed for GROMACS with configopts = "-DCUDA_HOST_COMPILER=$EBROOTGCCCORE/bin/gcc -DCUDA_PROPAGATE_HOST_FLAGS=OFF -DCUDA_NVCC_FLAGS='-std=c++11' " ?
  • Bart: adding support in EasyBuild framework for multi-Python setup used in ComputeCanada
    • enhance iteration of build cycle to allow for different sets of builddependencies
    • see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/2674
    • required to install a Python package for multiple different Python versions in a single installation dir
    • also need support to specify multiple Python prefixes
      • which implies not using $PYTHONPATH anymore
    • downside: Python packages need to be reinstalled when a new Python version is installed
      • but this can done such that existing (sub)installations are skipped
    • could consider this for central repository in the future
      • by opt-in in EasyBuild 3.x, maybe opt-out in EasyBuild 4.x
      • we'll support installing both separate modules (one per Python version) and a single module from a single easyconfig, idea is to let preference be indicated by configuration setting
    • sort of related to being able to combine both Python 2.x and 3.x in the same session, since that implies not using $PYTHONPATH
  • Victor: support for running EasyBuild for Python 3.x?
    • in the roadmap for EasyBuild 4.x (cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild/issues/447)
      • Python 2.7 will definitely also still be supported
      • Python 2.6 maybe (only if it doesn't cause too much pain); still useful for e.g. CentOS 6
        • but not having Python 2.6 support will not be considered a blocker!
    • vsc-base is (still) the blocker to move forward and support Python 3.x
      • either vsc-base will be ported to also support Python 3.x
      • or we will ingest what EasyBuild framework requires from vsc-base, and drop it as a dependency...
      • @boegel is getting quite fed up with this situation...
    • question is related to integrating EasyBuild & ReFrame (which requires Python 3.6)
  • Adam: is there an easy way to recognize PRs of first-time contributors?
    • not currently (that we know of)
    • feature request for Octobox?
    • could maybe be supported in --list-prs (ping Miguel?)