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Conference call notes 20191113

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Kenneth Hoste edited this page Nov 14, 2019 · 3 revisions

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Notes on the 136th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Nov 13th 2019 (17:00 - 18:00 CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (7):

  • Fotis Georgatos (SDSC, Switzerland)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, Oxford)
  • Eirini Koutsaniti (CSCS, Switzerland)
  • Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
  • Davide Vanzo (UT Southwestern)
  • Victor Holanda Rusu (CSCS, Switzerland)

Agenda

  • update on recent developments for next release (EasyBuild v4.1.0)
  • pros & cons of GitHub Actions vs Travis CI for running test suite
  • EasyBuild @ SC19
  • EUM'20
  • Q&A

Update on recent developments

GitHub Actions vs Travis CI for running test suite

  • Travis

    • pros
      • has worked well for a long time (in combination with @boegelbot)
      • automatic comments by @boegelbot to indicate broken tests in PR
    • cons
      • flaky test failures (usually due to connectivity issues)
        • mostly fixed by letting @boegelbot re-trigger these jobs in Travis
      • slow, only 5-6 test runs in parallel (across all easybuilders repositories)

  • GitHub Actions

    • pros
      • 20 test runs in parallel, so results come in a lot faster
      • native in GitHub
      • easily allows contributors to get test suite to pass first in their own fork before opening a PR
    • cons
      • (still in beta, but going stable mid Nov'19)
      • minor problem: closing/re-opening triggers a new batch of tests, old batch of (broken) tests in GitHub CI stays in place
        • can be dealt with by implementing support for eb --sync-pr-with-develop?

  • self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions?

EUM

EasyBuild @ SC19

  • "Getting Scientific Software Installed" BoF session hosted by Davide Vanzo (@vanzod) & Robert McLay (Lmod/XALT)
    • short talk by Maxime (ComputeCanada) on their CVMFS+Nix+EasyBuild setup (PEARC'19 paper)
    • interactive survey on tools related to software installation
  • get in touch with EasyBuilders attending SC19 via #sc19 channel in EasyBuild Slack
  • Davide will put together a social event (@ arcade bar)

Q&A

  • duplicate CUDA in fosscuda vs intelcuda
    • CUDAcore with system toolchain (hidden from users in ComputeCanada)
    • (empty) CUDA wrapper which loads CUDAcore & extends $MODULEPATH (in HMNS)
    • this didn't go happen for fosscuda/2019b
      • Kenneth was reluctant to go through with it, not a big fan of the *core naming scheme (confuses users)
    • Bart had another suggestion (which doesn't use CUDAcore)?
  • Victor & Eirini: aim at CSCS is to fully automate software deployment
  • Victor: how are test reports for PRs triggered?
    • currently done manually (via eb --from-pr 12345 -fr --upload-test-report, see https://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Integration_with_GitHub.html)
    • this could be automated, but needs some work (keeping security concerns in mind)
      • PRs that pass CI tests & are approved by a maintainer
      • VM could be spin op on demand for this
    • PRs that depend on other PRs could be re-visited automatically via scripting in GitHub Actions?
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