PETSc Testing?

[eslickj]

I want to set up some tests that use the PETSc solver. It's currently an optional install, and not installed for tests. The download is around 50 MB. My worry is that if we add this to the tests we may run into some kind of limits one one end or the other that cause or tests to periodically fail. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? Should I just do it and see how it goes?

Related issue, on windows I use the WSL to run the PETSc solver. I figure between that and Cygwin it's the lesser evil. I'm not sure it's worth the effort, but can we set up windows test that use WSL? Sounds like trouble, but at least I run that way so someone is testing it.

[jsiirola]

The short answer is that I wouldn't worry too much about it. Pyomo downloads IDAES-EXT (58MB), Baron (18MB), and GAMS (492MB). The one thing you can do is to leverage the GitHub cache action to cache things on the GitHub side so that you don't have to hit the source servers so often (the cache can also save you from having to rebuild: you can cache the binaries). The only catch is that there is a limit on the total size of all GHA caches for an organization (I think 5GB).

[lbianchi-lbl]

I agree with @jsiirola on both accounts: for IDAES we're already hitting GitHub's servers whenever we run idaes get-extensions, so I'd expect that adding another download of the same order of magnitude should work. Caching the built binaries is also something I think would be worth looking into, especially if the compilation takes a long time. All in all, I'd say it's worth to try the "naive" solution and see if that works.

For the second part, initially I wasn't very optimistic that it'd be possible to use WSL on GitHub Actions Windows runners, but from a cursory search it seems like it can be done (see e.g. https://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-wsl and a wider discussion at actions/runner-images#50). More in general, I think this could overlap with the wider "automating the Windows build/testing infrastructure" discussion that we (@eslickj, @ksbeattie, and myself) are (or will soon be) looking into.

[eslickj]

On the WSL thing, I guess it should be the same as the Ubuntu tests. I know we have run into at least a couple people using WSL to run IDAES, but I'm not totally sure if it needs special testing beyond the normal Linux tests. I guess the only thing that really needs tested is my little bit of wrapping to run Linux solvers in Windows via WSL. Really I could probably just document that as a sort-of unsupported method for running the Linux solvers in Windows. It's probably rarely going to change, so just me using it sometimes is probably enough testing.

[eslickj]

Okay, I'm going to close this. I'll just download the petsc solvers for linux tests since it's probably fine and we probably don't need to worry about WSL testing for now.