meeting Aug 5 2021

Notes for 20210805 meeting

20210805 meeting notes

• date & time: Thu August 5th 2021 - 2pm CEST (12:00 UTC)
  • (every first Thursday of the month)
• venue: (online, see mail for meeting link, or ask in Slack)
• agenda:
  • Quick introduction by new people
  • EESSI-related meetings in last month
  • Progress update per EESSI layer
  • 2021.06 version of pilot repository
  • AWS/Azure sponsorship update
  • AWS/Arm hackathon
  • Q&A

Slides

• see https://github.com/EESSI/meetings/blob/main/meetings/EESSI_meeting_20210805.pdf

Meeting notes

(by Kenneth & Alan)

Quick introduction by new people

• (no new people)

EESSI-related meetings in last month

• Azure sponsorship for EESSI kickoff meeting
  • some confusion about the kind of service EESSI provides
  • Alan clarified what type of access we would ideally need (not just a VM)
  • the intention is that we get our own sub-subscription in SURF Research Cloud

Progress update per EESSI layer

Filesystem layer

• A fix is in place for updating in place for CernVM-FS (useful for things like a glibc update)
  • No need to opt-in on the client side
  • Documentation still needed

Compatibility layer

• Security checks are done 3 times a week by a bot, notifications are given in a private channel on Slack
  • Could have our own runner to avoid exceeding limits for private repo on GitHub Actions
• Installation of updates is still a manual process

Software layer

• Running into problems with Java in 2021.06

  • glibc in compat layer is recent enough for this to cause problems
  • patchelf can solve this (which is what Compute Canada does)
  • could build from source...but that is not easy
    • Bob briefly looked into this

• Alan: update on MPI override stuff (see issue XXX)

  • Potential ABI compatibility problem with hwloc pulled in via OpenMPI
  • WI4MPI road also looks promising to easily switch between different MPI libraries (https://github.com/cea-hpc/wi4mpi)

AWS/Azure update

• sponsored AWS credits already being put to good use
• setup of access to Azure credits in progress

2021.06 version of pilot repository

• basically same state as it was last meeting
• need to implement fix for problem with Java to make progress

AWS /Arm hackathon

• Overview of recent week long hackathon
• Some YouTube videos available
• 205 test cases
• Additional links in slides

Q&A

• Jörg: AlphaFold (https://github.com/deepmind/alphafold) might be an interesting addition to EESSI, since it is generating a lot of interest (especially since installation from source is not easy)
  • Might be an interesting case to show the performance difference
• Jörg: How soon will EESSI be ready to be used in a pilot setup?
  • Already the case, EESSI pilot repository is already mounted on various Norwegian systems
  • Thomas: not actively promoted yet, but it is available
    • mostly intended to get more experience with the setup, and for easy access