Conference call notes 20180214

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Notes on the 95th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday February 14th 2018 (5pm - 6pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (XXX):

• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Davide Vanzo (Vanderbilt University)
• Javier Antonio Ruiz Bosch (HPC.CU)
• Bart Oldeman (McGill University, Canada)
• Shahzeb Siddiqui (Pfizer)
• Åke Sangren (Umeå University, Sweden)
• Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, University of Oxford)
• Victor Holanda (CSCS)

Agenda

• Report on EasyBuild User Meeting
  • Lots of talks
  • About 40 people
• Update on Tensorflow build
  • Very close to being merged
  • During the User Meeting Ake made it work with GPUs, tested on K80s
• Adding vectorisation as default GCC option - https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/2388
  • Tough call to make a default
  • Intel vectorises by default, big deal on newer archs
    • Default (now) is to be conservative for AVX512, use AVX2 unless there is benefit
  • Kicks in at -O3 for GCC
  • Maybe a configuration setting? Will likely be ignored by most
  • GROMACS speeds up when dropping from -O2 to -O1 with Intel at CSCS and may be related to vectorisation
    • GROMACS manually vectorised
    • GROMACS may be a good candidate for lowopt option
  • Keep the discussion going in the ticket
• Adding a builddeps bundle as part of a toolchain (see discussion on the mailing list)
  • For Cray this doesn't help at all
    • Could just use --filter-deps on the bundle
• Allow basic compiler modulenames to be specified as keys in optarch - https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/2387
• Update on Singularity integration - https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/2332
  • Pretty feature complete
  • Outputs singularity recipes
    • Building a container requires su
  • Bootstrap design at present, incrementally building a toolchain stack
    • Available on Singularity Hub
    • GCC does not build there (probably because it takes too much time, recipe works locally)
  • Beginnings of a recipe repo at https://github.com/easybuilders/eb-singularity
  • Current focus is to build a toolchain container that allows people to build applications on top
    • Not (currently) intended to house a spectrum of toolchains
• Q&A

Notes

Report on EasyBuild User Meeting

• https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild/wiki/3rd-EasyBuild-User-Meeting
• recordings available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcLR_hjhgUcjpOovjMveibrj1xgOz4IoV

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