Conference call notes 20200624 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 150th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday June 24th 2020 (13:00 UTC - 15:00 CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (10):

  • Terry Arter (Kings College London, UK)
  • Simon Branford (Univ. of Birmingham, UK)
  • Miguel Dias Costa (Univ. of Singapore)
  • Alex Domingo (VUB, Belgium)
  • Fotis Georgatos (SDSC, Switzerland)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, Oxford, UK)
  • Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
  • Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)
  • Lars Viklund (Umeå University, Sweden)

Agenda

  • recent developments (merged PRs)
  • quick evaluation of yesterday's online EasyBuild tutorial
  • Q&A

Recent developments

  • ETA for next release (probably EasyBuild v4.2.2): 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 sources (incl. git_config) for extensions (PR #3294) + accompanying docs update (PR #617)
        • deprecate source_tmpl in extensions?
    • easyblocks
      • fixed bug in PythonBundle: module that is loaded before installing extensions was not updating $PYTHONPATH anymore (PR #2081)
        • introduced in PR #2075, so was only present in develop branch (not a problem in EasyBuild v4.2.1 or earlier releases)
    • easyconfigs
      • (nothing special, lots of software updates, some minor fixes)
  • PRs/issues of interest (hopefully to be merged soon)
    • framework
      • also take into account builddependencies for template values like %(pyver)s (PR #3346)
      • fixes for --try-update-deps (PRs #3353, #3350)
      • hang triggered by easyconfigs index? (issue #3360)
      • fixed order for $LD_LIBRARY_PATH update (PR #3367)
        • order in $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is now fixed (and not using alphabetical sorting)
        • but order in list is reversed in environment after module file is loaded
          • it was always like this, so we should keep it like that?
        • affect impi installations (but not dramatically)
        • https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/2080 should also be merged with it
    • easyblocks
      • fix for OpenCV to support non-Intel builds (PR #2056)
        • tests are broken because of incorrect replacing of %(pyshortver)s in dumped easyconfig
      • fix issues with latest Qt5 (issue #2076)
    • easyconfigs
  • we should also clean up the 2020a branch, and get it completely collapsed into develop

EasyBuild tutorial: quick evaluation

  • 101 registered
    • 98 simultaneous viewers at peak on YouTube, ~50 people watched to the end
    • ~65 people actively used AWS env
    • ~85 people in #tutorial channel in Slack
  • ran out of time, too much content (+ some delay due to technical issues)
    • 5h (skipped breaks + skip some contents)
    • 3x 2h (Mon/Wed/Fri)
      • exercises as homework, support in Slack
    • physical tutorial
      • demo only, exercises as homework
      • "checkpoints" in between parts to catch up and prep for next part
  • glitches in AWS with container (https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-tutorial/issues/55)
  • additional topics
    • easyblocks
    • Fotis: also cover --try-* options
      • both stuff that works, and stuff that doesn't
    • different view points: sysadmin, usage, advanced, ...
  • Åke: limit number of participants for practical reasons
    • hard to keep up with answering questions...
    • make it clear which questions will be raised during
    • Fotis: will be better when clean recordings are there

OpenMPI/UCX/PMIx presentation

Q&A

  • Mikael: has anyone looked at CUDA 11?
    • still a release candidate
    • relevant to fosscuda/2020a
    • do we need easyconfigs using system toolchain + GCC + iccifort?!
      • Åke: yes, CUDA with system toolchain is for e.g. MotionCor
      • others are need to get HierarhicalMNS working correctly
      • to avoid this we'd have to generate multiple module files for a single CUDA installation...
    • version.txt shows different version?! (11.0.1 vs 11.0.82?)
    • K40s no longer supported?