meeting May 5 2022

Notes for 2022-05-05 meeting

• date & time: Thu 5 May 2022 - 14:00 CET (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
  • 2021.12 version of pilot repository
  • AWS/Azure sponsorship update
  • Upcoming events
  • Q&A

Slides

• available at https://github.com/EESSI/meetings/blob/main/meetings/EESSI_meeting_20220505.pdf

Meeting notes

(by Kenneth)

Quick introduction by new people

• Kamil Braschke (Univ. of Wuppertal, BUW)

EESSI-related meetings in last month

• April 25th: EESSI/AWS sync
  • AWS is looking for "big" projects
  • some discussion about build vs testing farms
  • issue with libfabric and ParallelCluster
    • AWS heavily patches libfabric, not everything is upstreamed yet, important for AWS' EFA network
    • check with AWS ParallelCluster developers whether there are some patches for libfabric that we should be applying too
    • we'll need to make sure that those patches don't cause trouble on other systems (like OmniPath)
    • should also

Progress update per EESSI layer

Filesystem layer

(see slides)

• KH will ask for update about corruption issue during upcoming CVMFS coordination meeting (May 9)
• IPS was flagging CVMFS packets on port 80 (HTTP, not HTTPS), likely not only affecting alien cache preloading ... alien cache preloading may just be more likely affected as it pulls in lots of data in a short time

Compatibility layer

(see slides)

• ...

Software layer

(see slides)

• Alan: work is needed for MPItrampoline to improve Fortran support w.r.t. constants
  • strictly speaking (according to the Fortran standard) applications are not supposed to use constants at compile time, but they do (and it's broadly done)
  • would be interesting to have a full toolchain with MPItrampoline and some software installed on top of it (GROMACS?) so people can experiment with it
  • you still need an "MPI wrapper" library for every MPI "backend" you want to use with MPItrampoline
• Martin: RPATH wrappers
  • Problem 2: maybe some hook could be used to treat special needs of EESSI in EasyBuild?
  • KH will take a closer look to Martin's framework PR to get a clearer view and to agree on a way forward
• (EESSI) bot
  • try to join forces
  • Joerg has some ideas allowing users to select a software package via Open OnDemand interface, then it gets installed and either user receives a note of success or sys admins receive a note of failure
• GPU support: call for testing
  • should ask Michael to open a PR for what we have currently
  • CUDA samples will need to be installed

2021.12 version of pilot repository

(see slides)

infrastructure

• support for Azure working well
• maybe need some function "Give me the smallest instance delivering N virtual CPU cores, ..."?
• maybe we can make a drawing of the infrastructure?
• goal: roll out complete test environment
• Under http://status.eessi-infra.org/, Repositories has a green tick, but actually cvmfs-config and data both have big red X's
  • cvmfs-config can be removed
  • maybe we don't need the green tick mark? or mention that something is under development

AWS/Azure sponsorship update

(see slides)

• ...

OCRE CfP

• Possible to get up to 500K in vouchers, which can be used for resources or consultancy
• No funding for personnel
  • Concern that this might bring bureaucratic overhead that will effort available to actually develop EESSI
• To make a proper decision we should review the available information about the call
  • Suggestion is schedule a call for early next week, those who attend should review the call information at https://ocre-project.eu/funding-opportunities/ocre-funding-and-procurement-call

Upcoming events

• ...

Q&A

• ...