Meeting 2023 11 13 - openpmix/openpmix GitHub Wiki

November 13, 2023 OpenPMIx-devel Face-to-Face (SC23, Denver, CO)

Attendees

  • Ralph
  • Tim
  • Amir
  • David
  • Huber
  • Thomas
  • Wael
  • Martin
  • Howard
  • Aurelien
  • others?

Notes

Key project liaison PoC

  • Good to gather contacts for interested projects:
    • Slurm - Tim Wickford
    • Altair - Mike Karos, really care about prte
    • Open MPI
  • Identify points of contact at all the major customers
  • Identify pain points with contacts, so far these are known pain points:
    • command line parsing
    • man pages for the command line tools when used by downstream project

Organization chart/roles

  • Few key roles:
    • SPI: overarching org, host for both PMIx standard and Open PMIx ref impls.
    • Release Mgr: prepare release tarballs, nag people about PR readiness towards release goals
    • Project Liaisons
    • CI czar(s)
    • standard chair
    • PR gatekeeping: merge PR / review board, today Ralph and Thomas have write access; how (or do we) move from the 'benevolent dictator' model?
  • An “Arch Review Board/Group”  would be very good
    • Oversee major architectural directions.
  • Point made that for PR reviews, have to sort of items
    • Roadmap – introducing feature additions
    • Stable release maintenance

Release process

  • Separate development/feature additions to fit into the roadmap
  • Do we want to clarify the release process?
    • feature based
    • time based
    • PMIx Standard for introducing changes at different cadence from OpenPMIx
    • Avoid drift between standardized implementation and extra features (experimental, non standard features remain out of namespace)
    • Ultimately this seems like the kind of thing we will discuss w/ release mgrs and group as a whole
    • Release process for OpenPMIx and coordination w/ PMIx
    • Howard knows ompi release cycle, possibly helpful for openpmix release mgmt

Nurturing new features

  • Other point of discussion related to “feature request” development
    • Possibly need a target “contract for hire” organization (future opportunities for someone) but at the moment that seems like it may be a gap once Ralph departs given the current participants.
    • The point here are for items that an entity might want developed but does not have the expertise/time/resources in house to develop them in-house, or just wants to contract to someone else
  • Who drives the next set of projects/needs?
    • Engagement w/ Ralph in past
  • Define roadmap and release (feature) elements along that path
    • The standard could be a host for the 'long term roadmap' discussion and fleshing out proposed additions (rather than scattered one-on-one collabs).
    • PRs to sandard and implementation cross-refer
    • Standard text can be used as documentation for the feature
    • Implementation is demonstration that capability is implementable (almost required to have impl. for standardization consideration).
    • We can nimbly spin 'working groups' that are can consider both standardization and implementation in a coordinated manner.

Action items

  • Roadmap “ralph brain dump”
    • Note: Fully supports/flexible for having group drive the roadmap, just good to have current plans/items “in progress” to ensure they are captured.
  • Architectural docs - openpmix vs prte
    • contributing guide
    • Note: Possibly focused sessions, using Ralph as oracle and others capturing/documenting details
    • Note: PRTE is the more challenging pieces as it has much more asynchronous flow
  • Get a state of current CI (github actions vs ompi-jenkins)
  • Release process doc (pmix & prte)
  • SPI sub-group
    • Structure under PMIx standard
    • Structure under OpenPMIx / Library
    • Aurelien and Thomas will work on moving under SPI
  • Workflow manager meeting
    • Setup meeting to see how can coordinate and possibly organize on contrib of effort
  • Identify points of contact for customers/liasons
    • Create a “downstream-consumer” mailing list like ompi pkgers list
  • Closing Remark: Key take away point/request from Ralph, happy to help in any way possible and to allow engaged parties to step in and lead.  The main point being there will need to be people that respond to issues and fix things as they come up.