Firedrake meeting 2023 10 11

Date and time 2023-10-11 16:00 BST (1500 UTC)

Action Items

1. Pick Chair and Minuter (NB to pick minuter)
2. ALL: (ongoing) triage the open issues and confirm if they are indeed still open (and perhaps provide labels)
3. JB: Move pyop3 and FInAT to firedrakeproject
4. ALL: do things with SV's branches
5. DH: Email to Andreas to have 2 (+ others!!!) loopy PRs merged
6. DH: Get Firedrake a docker open source account (link here)
7. DH: Talk to GregVernon about PR#2116.
8. DH: Revisit PR#2484.
9. JB: Scheduled GitHub actions to avoid inactivity timeout for website repo (minutes)
10. DH: Order more Firedrake stickers
11. ALL/ANY: Drop libsupermesh (minutes)?

Minutes

Present: JB, CW, DD, KS, DH, NB, PB, RNH, UZ, IM, RK

Apologies:

MacOS Installation issues

There is an open issue with Clang 15 where you must use ldclassic flags to restore old behaviour.

It is unclear (right now) whether rolling back to Clang 14 might fix this.

MacOS Build hardware

Our Mac build hardware is currently not usable, mainly due restrictive Imperial ICT policies.

NetGEN

• Stable NetGEN doesn't have features that Firedrake needs.
• Need to use nightly.
• Nightly isn't stable.
• Umberto has created a fork.
• Building from scratch takes too long!
• Umberto is now setting up CI on this for to build a wheel from source.

DH: This is a reasonable short term solution, but we don't want to have to build this wheel forever. This needs to go into netGEN stable.

JB: Action item UZ mark netGEN tests as xfail (urgently).

Firedrake Wheels

DH: JB is working on developing "fat" wheels for installing PETSc and ultimately Firedrake.

Machine learning want a wheel, but they need to take a long look at how you currently install pytorch and tensor flow before criticising Firedrake.

Things for Jack to do:

Action item JB: Update Github PR template.

RNH: What's happening with libsupermesh

JB: We can keep it around if we get our rtree PR in. DH: However, its days are numbered if it starts holding up progress on a Firedrake wheel. Also it doesn't work 100% in parallel. VOM does work in parallel (although is not conservative).

Merge PRs

• RNH: Test (and fix!) cross mesh interpolation annotation #3145 Merged.
• JB: #3041 FML is ready. Changes requested.
• CW: #3141 Merged.
• CW: #3135 Merged.
• KS: #3139 Merged.
• PB: #3114 Closed.
• KS: #3049 Rebase required.

Date of next meeting

1600 BST (1500 UTC) 2023-10-18