Conference Call on Dual Serial MPI builds

Following the proposal to introduce new packages that are serial builds of existing packages, we have received several comments about its implementation in EasyBuild. Therefore, it will be convenient that all interested parties discuss all open options in a conference call.

Project Goal

Several packages sit in high-level toolchains with MPI but cannot use any of the MPI features. That is caused by a few dependencies that currently are built with their full array of features (including MPI). The goal is to make new packages for such dependencies in lower toolchains without MPI (serial builds) in a way that

1. serial builds can be used as dependencies and hence, lower the toolchain of those packages that cannot use MPI
2. serial builds should be loadable alongside their regular counterparts in higher toolchains

Talking Points

• Agreement on project goals
• Packages that should have a serial build
  • Boost (PR #11145)
  • HDF5 (PR #11155)
• Packages that can potentially be moved to lower toolchains by using serial dependencies
  • Candidates: BLAST+, BLASR, Libint, MariaDB, netCDF, ncbi-vdb, OpenBabel, PCMSolver, Salmon, SRA-Toolkit (PR #11161), ...
• Implementation of the dual packages with serial and MPI builds:
  • Naming scheme: packages with suffixes, packages with default name
  • Bundle modules: package with default name that bundles the _serial and MPI builds
  • Visibility of modules: serial packages used only as dependencies could be hidden by default

Practical

The conference calls are done by means of a zoom.us conference call.

To join the conference calls, use this link: https://tiny.cc/eb_conf_call (which redirects to https://umu.zoom.us/j/561463243).

Schedule

To be determined. Please contact @lexming in our Slack channel for proposals.