Conference call notes 20191030

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Notes on the 135th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Oct 30th 2019 (17:00 - 18:00 CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (3):

• Markus Geimer (Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Germany)
• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Bart Oldeman (McGill University, Compute Canada)

Agenda

• update on last release (EasyBuild v4.0.1)
• update on recently merged PRs
• Q&A

Update on last release (EasyBuild v4.0.1)

• Released two weeks ago on Oct 17.

PRs for next release (EasyBuild v4.0.2?)

• framework: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/milestone/73
• easyblocks: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/milestone/62
• easyconfigs https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/milestone/65
  • Mikael observed that the number of packages in R just keeps on growing: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/9184 Should we select a minimal set of popular packages and leave the rest in a bundle? Bart: At Compute Canada we don't install any package and leave it up to the user. Should be discussed further for example in Slack, involve John Dey (Fred Hutch)
  • CUDA toolchains with HMNS
    • https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/9178
    • Idea: install CUDA at GCCcore level: problem: how can this CUDA extend MODULEPATH to Compiler/intel-CUDA/version within intelcuda?
    • Alternative implemented at Compute Canada: split CUDA into CUDAcore (system toolchain) and a CUDA bundle for GCC, iccifort or other compilers, much like GCCcore vs GCC.
    • In both cases you avoid duplicate binary CUDA installations, and can install things common to both fosscuda and intelcuda (e.g. UCX with CUDA support, cuDNN, GCC with support for OpenACC/OpenMP offloading, ...)
    • Another alternative: Markus: use CUDA as dependency instead (for software that don't use MPI) and CUDA as suffix to OpenMPI?

Q&A

Markus: Q: was surprised to see setuptools used in the bootstrap_eb script for v4 of easybuild, even though it was no longer supposed to use setuptools. A: This is being addressed in https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/3028