Telcon: 2016 01 14

Participants

• Todd Gamblin
• Greg Becker
• Jim Galarowicz
• Mark Miller
• Matt Legendre
• Mike Collette
• Peter Scheibel
• Ben Boeckel
• Greg Lee
• Iain Morgan

News and discussion

1. External Spack repos demo

2. Boost variant changes (Peter Scheibel)

• Changed boost so that without any variants, it builds with none of them
• Semantics of packages depending on variants is more consistent
• Should we make more variants default to enabled?
  • Doesn't affect semantics; just defaults.

1. NAG Compiler support (Adam Stewart, ANL)

• Should NAG default to using gcc for the C/C++ compilers?
• NAG isn't being found b/c it's only a Fortran Compiler

1. No more clang package; Clang merged into reworked LLVM package

• Many more features & extensions.
• Lots of logic exposed in LLVM package
• Thinking about features to reduce complexity.

1. Discussion of how BLAS and LAPACK should be factored came up as part of R rework

• Some suggested merging them
• Todd would like to keep things flexible but have saner defaults.

1. New Architecture descriptors as part of Cray Port

• Greg Becker working on this.
• Spack architecture will look like this:
  • platform-os-target
  • Example platforms: BGQ, Cray, Linux, darwin
  • Example OS names: redhat6, ubuntu10, snowleopard, mavericks, yosemite, elcappitan
    • Trying to represent binary compatible OS releases as a single identifier.
    • Only change the version when we need to rebuild
  • Example targets: x86_64 (general), haswell (more specific ISA), xeonphi, ppc64, arm64, etc.
• OS field will help with OS upgrades where software needs to be rebuilt
• Also differentiates compiles for compute OS (e.g. BG/Q CNK) from front-end (e.g. SUSE) when target is same
• platform, os, and target are all separate fields on Spack spec object (and spec.yaml)
  • Will probably display as platform-os-target in the CLI
  • Will try to offer shorthand for spec entry, e.g. arch=platform-os-target on the command line.

Issues

1. John Westlund is trying to put Spack into OpenHPC: #351, #352

• Need to address some issues with spack bootstrap
• Minor changes needed to external packages support so that RPMs can install Spack external package descriptors.
  • externals currently all in one file
  • need file per external package

1. Should Spack have a Coding standard

• Also,should all the packages be lowercase? #326

Discussion

• Welcome to Iain Morgan from NASA Ames
  • building for Pleiades
    • SuSE Linux with SGI MPT MPI
      • Need external MPI
      • some GPUs, Intel MICs
    • Pleiades uses tcl modules, but trying to move to Lmod
      • common file that implements logging (syslog, what modules are loaded, versions, etc.)
      • need a feature to automatically include such a file
    • Mostly using gcc, but also Intel & PGI compilers
    • Not cross-compiled for the backend
      • maybe should?
    • Cluster is somewhat heterogeneous, but software is mostly lowest common denominator
  • Started using NetBSD pkgsrc, not flexible enough for HPC environment
  • Found out about Spack at SC15
  • usability issue:
    • Colors are hard to see for some people
    • Allow color to be disabled.
    • Allow different color schemes.