Maintainers conference call notes 20180704

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Notes on the 1st EasyBuild maintainers conference call, Wednesday July 4th 2018 (4pm - 5pm CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (7):

• Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
• Miguel Dias Costa (National University of Singapore)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Ward Poelmans (VUB, Belgium)
• Bart Oldeman (ComputeCanada)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)

Agenda

• early evaluation of MotW experiment
• fixing 2018b toolchains
• outlook to EasyBuild 3.6.2: what's left to do

MotW experiments

• https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild/wiki/Maintainer-of-the-week-(MotW)
• feedback after MotW duty was mostly positive
• Damian: haven't spent time I was hoping yet
• Åke: more activity?
• Miguel: more focus
• Ward: difficult to combine due to cluster problems
• tags for abandoned PRs?
  • will be picked during cleanup of old PRs
  • Miguel: can be done automatically via --close-pr
    • REFERENCE
• Åke: may be helpful to document what to do during MotW duty?
• conclusion: for now, let's try to keep it up...

2018b toolchains

• https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/labels/2018b
• foss/2018b was updated to include OpenBLAS 0.3.1 & OpenMPI 3.1.1
• 2018b toolchains can be considered fixed now, will be included with EasyBuild v3.6.2
• easyconfigs for Perl, Python 2 & 3 and R 3.5.1 using 2018b toolchains will be included too
• Åke will try to look into fosscuda/2018b

EasyBuild 3.6.2

• framework
  • https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/milestone/57
  • update for containers support that makes it Docker-aware should be good to go
    • https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/2479
  • Åke: would be nice to get https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/2395 merged too
• easyblocks
  • https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/milestone/49
  • no blockers for EasyBuild v3.6.2
• easyconfigs
  • https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/milestone/52
  • biggest focus will be on 2018b toolchains + PRs for easyconfigs using it
    • cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/labels/2018b
  • PRs to fix missing dependencies for Perl extensions should definitely go in too
  • Perl 5.26.1: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6532
  • Perl 5.28.0: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6533
  • corresponding fix for Perl easyblock will be included later
    • cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1449
    • need to figure out how to deal with fallout first, mainly w.r.t. older Perl easyconfigs
  • Åke: fix for OpenMPI 3.1.1?
    • https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6519#issuecomment-402405668
    • fix for OpenMPI hangs?
    • not specific to POWER

Other

• Bart: OpenBLAS doesn't support Skylake X (AVX-512) well yet, cfr. https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/issues/1643 (FYI)
  • should be easy to see with HPL with foss/2018b vs intel/2018b on Skylake systems
  • (real) alternatives for OpenBLAS?
    • BLIS?, ATLAS?