Telcon: 2016 03 03

Participants

1. Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
2. James Amundsen (Fermilab)
3. Ben Boeckel (Kitware)
4. Brett Viren (BNL)
5. Mike Collette (LLNL)
6. Robert French (ORNL)
7. John G (?)
8. Greg Becker (LLNL)
9. Cyrus Harrison (LLNL)
10. Mark Miller (LLNL)
11. Peter Scheibel (LLNL)
12. Jim Galarowicz (Krell)
13. D'jay Deo (Kitware)

Should be done (but isn't yet)

1. External packages and concretization preferences

• Still fighting bugs with config file format.

News

• Welcome to a number of new contributors!
• Mailing list & PRs have been very busy.

Merge now in progress:

1. Cray + Platform/OS/target support

• This includes full support for Cray platforms, and splits the architecture into:
  • Platform (E.g. Cray XC)
  • OS (e.g. RHEL7, CNK, CNL, Debian, etc.)
  • Target (e.g. haswell, xeonphi)
• Also includes:
  • Ability to search for compilers in modules
  • Ability to use different compiler search strategies depending on the OS.
  • Ability to use module-loaded compilers in a build.
• More detail will change spec hashes!
• Will require changes to compilers.yaml
  • Should probably require a clean Spack checkout for these features.
• We'll likely put this into develop once 0.9 is out (next 2 weeks)
• Will appear in the Spack 1.0 release (see below for details)
• Discussion:
  • we may need to rethink compilers.yaml

    • too much nesting right now, want entries that are independent, e.g., maybe:

      compilers:
          <name>:
              spec: gcc@4.4.7
              architecture:
                  platform: Linux
                  os: RHEL7
                  target: haswell
              cc: /path/to/cc
              cxx: /path/to/cxx
              f77: /path/to/f77
              fc: /path/to/fc
      

Other News

1. Update from Peter on RPM packaging.

2. Spack now stores more provenance in the install prefix. This includes the build environment and all package.py files used for a build inside the install prefix:

      $prefix/.spack/
        spec.yaml       # Full build spec.
        build.out       # build output log
        build.env       # stored build environment
        repos/
          builtin/    # this is a package repository containing all `package.py` files for's the spec.
            repo.py
            packages/
              libelf/package.py
              libdwarf/package.py
          otherrepo/
           # etc.

3. Adam Stewart took a first stab at bash completion for Spack

4. Debate on how to package netcdf?

5. Refactored code in Stage Thanks to @alalazo.

6. New contributions from @glennpj and @citibeth.

7. Merged in support for booleans in when=<arg>

• This is a good stop gap until Platform/OS/Target spec support is merged in (see below)

1. Lots of good suggestions being added to issues.
2. Ben Boeckel (Kitware) almost done with build & run dependencies

• currently in review

1. Starting to review and integrate Erik's PRs and issues.

Roadmap

1. Version 0.9 (next 2 weeks):

• External packages & concretization preferences
• Build dependencies
• Customizing modules
• Better support for adding variables to modules (already in develop)
• optional dependencies and variants (already in develop)

2. Version 1.0 (early April):

• Full platform/os/target support
  • This will likely break backward config file compatibility (compilers.yaml)
• Better support for platforms:
  • Cray
  • BG/Q
  • Mac OS X
    • Merge Erik's Mac OS features based on platform/OS support.
• Fix for issues discussed in issue #311
  • Try harder to satisfy specs with existing packages
  • Fewer rebuilds, more stable installations, less confusion :)

Discussion