Conference call notes 20160914

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Notes on the 58th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday August 31st 2016 (5pm - 6pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (5):

• Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
• Pablo Escobar (sciCORE/UniBas, Switzerland)
• Adam Huffman (Francis Crick Institute, UK)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)

Agenda

• significant speedup of easyconfigs test suite
• (generated) list of supported software @ easybuild.readthedocs.io
  • see http://boegel-eb.readthedocs.io/en/list_software/version-specific/Supported_software.html
• (minor) update on support for rpath
• Q&A

Notes

• EasyBuild v2.9.0

  • hopefully by mid next week...
  • rpath support will not block this release any further

• boegel's rpath branch: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/compare/develop...boegel:rpath

• Joachim: advantages of rpath?

  • avoids setting $LD_LIBRARY_PATH
    • smaller environment
    • avoids that other tools get broken because ABI-incompatible libs are suddenly picked up
  • may speed up starting of binaries because it doesn't have to scan $LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  • a whole bunch of dependencies could be made to only build deps
    • but this also impacts easyconfigs in central repo

• disadvantage of rpath

  • can't later move installations to another path (but that may break things anyway)

• Joachim: MPI test commands in easyblocks, e.g. NAMD, GAMESS-US

  • somehow specify job launcher (e.g. srun): eb --mpi-launcher="srun -n %(nr_ranks)s %(cmd)s"
  • ability to disable tests (without changing easyconfig): eb --no-mpi-tests
  • eb --mpi-tests-only --experimental
    • or, move the tests to test_cases_step and only run that (easier)

• Markus: progress on https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/1438 ?!

  • 'fix' in vsc-base didn't make it through, should be fixed 'properly' via an options serializer...
  • actually two separate issues, problem with combining --try-* and --job can be fixed fairly easily
    • see submit_jobs in easybuild/tools/parallelbuild.py
  • monkey patching of shell_quote in EB to dance around this until there's a proper fix in vsc-base?