Conference call notes 20191002

(back to Conference calls)

Notes on the 133th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Oct 2nd 2019 (17:00 - 17:30 CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (4):

• Damian Alvarez (Jülich Supercomputing Centre)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
• Fotis Georgatos (SDSC, Switzerland)
• Bart Oldeman (ComputeCanada)

Agenda

• update on next release (EasyBuild v4.0.1)
• switch to GitHub Actions for CI?
• initial testing on CentOS 8
• Q&A

Update on next release (EasyBuild v4.0.1)

• ETA:

• framework: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/milestone/72

  • handful of small bugs fixed (see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/milestone/72?closed=1)
  • ghost install dirs after reinstall with --force/--rebuild should definitely get fixed for v4.0.1
  • see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/issues/3026 should definitely

• easyblocks: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/milestone/61

  • small bug fixes & updates (incl. TensorFlow 1.14.0 w/ CUDA+MPI support)

• easyconfigs: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/milestone/64

  • already 100+ merged PRs...

Switch to GitHub Actions for CI?

• added GitHub Actions workflow for running easybuild-framework test suite in GitHub CI environment
  • see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/3039
• results of test suite runs @ https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/actions (+ new PRs)
• TODO:
  • easyblocks repo
  • easyconfigs repo
  • easybuild repo
• GitHub Actions opens the door for further automation
  • automated test reports for easyconfig PRs
  • auto-merge easyconfig PRs if all requirements are met (visual review by maintainer, test report, test suite passed in CI)

Initial testing on CentOS 8

• tested in a Singularity container using CentOS 8.0.1905
• eb was run on top of python3 (Python 3.6.8)
• no python command available
  • is optional in CentOS 8 (opt-in, pick python2 or python3 as default python)
  • was deliberately not done in testing environment, to assess impact...
• testing building foss/2019b + Python/2.7.16-GCCcore-8.3.0 + Python/3.7.4-GCCcore-8.3.0 from scratch
• small issues that popped up were fixed:
  • installing libxml2 expected python command to be available (via PythonPackage easyblock)
    • fixed in https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1818
  • fixed UnicodeDecodeError in ConfigureMake
    • see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1817 + https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1821
    • was actually caused by using C locale in combination with Python 3 (nothing to do with CentOS 8 specifically)

Q&A

• support for building TensorFlow v2.0 from source
  • small update needed for TensorFlow easyblock: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/pull/1823
  • easyconfig PRs coming soon
    • build & install works with foss/2019a and updated fosscuda (soon to be fosscuda/2019b)
    • need to add a new smoke test (since mnist_with_summaries.py tutorial example is broken beyond repair)