Telcon: 2015 10 08

Participants

• Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
• Greg Becker (LLNL)
• Matt Legendre (LLNL)
• Mike Collette (LLNL)
• Greg Lee (LLNL)
• Pete Scheibel (LLNL)

News and Contributions

We are furiously integrating all of this for the SC15 timeframe.

1. Greg Becker (@becker33) is almost done with support for builds with custom compiler flags

• Spack compiler wrappers can add compilers flags directly to the compile line.
• Added flags are added to the build's spec.yaml
  • This means each combination of added flags has a new hash.
  • Allows parameter studies of compiler options.
• Currently getting the kinks out of concretization.

1. Matt Legendre has submitted a PR for external package support

• Allows use of system MPI versions in builds
  • Finally!
• External packages have more lenient concretization rules
  • You can link your package that uses gcc@4.8 with an MPI compiled with, say, gcc@4.7
  • ABI compatibility tests are based on libstdcxx and libgcc_s versions
• Simple ABI compatibility checking
  • Don't know of another system that supports this at all.
• Provides support for concretization policies so that you can tell Spack what packages to prefer over others.
  • See in-code documentation here.

1. Peter Scheibel at LLNL now working on continuous integration for Spack packages

• Should make packages much more robust in the long run (boost in the short run)
• Converting spack test output to JUnit or TAP
• Adding capability to test package builds and get parable output.
• Integrating testing with Bamboo at LLNL.

1. Mario Melara and Joaquin Correa at NERSC are working on Cray support with Todd

• NERSC tried to build a number of packages on Cori
  • @karenyyng has george building (needs integration by Todd)
• Mario looking at pkg-config as a way to integrate with the Cray build.
  • Seems that Cray uses this extensively in the PrgEnv
    • Might be best way to introspect the environment and find compilers.
    • cf. loading modules -- which is more reliable?

1. Massimiliano Culpo (@alalazo) contributed:

• Preliminary Lmod hierarchical module support
• Some fixes and variants for the GCC package (testing this at LLNL)

1. Kitware ParaView spackaging begins

• Kitware has started work on this, details TBA.

1. @karenyyng has started a PyPI package importer for Spack
2. Thanks to the BLAS folks at netlib, who started versioning the BLAS tarball in response to our request.

• @markcmiller86 already implemented a new netlib-blas package based on it.

Bugs

• Python not linking properly to bzip2 due to lack of generic lib symlink.
• Documentation bug for spack -k
• spack find does not find vdeps

Discussion

1. Internal LLNL code sharing -- how to do it.

• Need repo for both Collette and Brunner
• Probably need internal contribution process for production packages.