Conference call notes 20141128

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Notes on the 21st EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday November 28th 2014 (3.00pm - 3.30pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (7):

• Petar Forai (GMI, Austria)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Ward Poelmans (UGent, Belgium)
• Robert McLay (TACC, US)
• Jens Timmerman (HPC-UGent, Belgium)

Agenda

• overview of EasyBuild events and discussions at SC14 (Petar, Jens)

Notes

overview of EasyBuild events and discussions at SC14

• most people already knew about EasyBuild & Lmod

  • interest by several commercial companies in Lmod

• lots of 'grumpy Jims', small sites drowning in work

• excellent talk by Markus at HUST14

  • quite a bit of discussion afterwards
  • post-talk questions (thanks Robert for keeping track):

• alternative tool: Spack

  • has nice features: advanced dependency handling support, powerful command line
  • now also supports generating module files
  • merge between EasyBuild and Spack should be discussed again with Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
    • licensing allows merging Spack (LGPL) into EasyBuild (GPLv2) already
    • one way may be to host both tools in a single repository, and merge gradually

• EasyBuild & Lmod were promoted by Olli-Pekka (CSC, Finland) at (private) Cray meeting

Other topics

• next EasyBuild release?

  • EasyBuild v1.16 mid-December 2014
  • delayed due to revamped EasyBuild documentation, SC14, HPC-UGent site maintenance, etc.
  • will support disabling deprecated behaviour, to prepare for EasyBuild v2.0 (1st release of 2015)
  • issues uncovered during 2-day hackathon at JSC in Oct'14 should be mostly fixed

• Lmod plans

  • the open 'matrix' problem
    • multiple parents in a hierarchy (e.g., OpenBLAS vs Intel MKL)
      • gets even more complex with BLAS+FFTW (1 parent with Intel MKL, two parents with OpenBLAS/FFTW)
    • solution @ TACC for now is to use Rpath rather than prereqs
    • basically a graph problem, so talk to someone doing graph research?
      • dynamic path search in a multi-dimensional graph with limited visibility
    • talk to Todd about this, since he has advanced dependency resolution support in Spack
    • take a look at how dependency (Zapherano)