Telcon: 2016 10 27

Participants

1. Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
2. Peter Scheibel (LLNL)
3. Ben Boeckel (Kitware)
4. Greg Becker (LLNL)
5. Greg Lee (LLNL)
6. Jim Amundson (Fermi)
7. Mario Melara (NERSC)
8. Mike Collette (LLNL)
9. Patrick Gartung (Fermi)

News & Updates

Spack v0.10 status

1. Lots of bugs being found and squashed for 0.10 release - monitor progress at the Spack v0.10 project page
2. Some long-awaited features also finally getting merged - configuration files - Custom LD_LIBRARY_PATH per compiler
3. Currently shooting for Thursday, November 3 27 to have all issues resolved - We'll Make release branch and commence testing once that is done.

SC16 Tutorial status

1. Slides have been done for a while
2. Going through docs and updating to match v0.10
3. We'll be adding "scripts" for different sections of the tutorial - simple step-by-step guides to basic tasks - these will be in the Spack docs once done.

New config.yaml file format

Discussion Missing anything?

• need to add module install paths to this?
• maybe they should go in modules.yaml?
  • might be nice to consolidate install locations here, and let modules.yaml continue to define how to set up modules.
• may not implement config scopes setting initially, but it would allow a user or site to set which config files have top precedence.

# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
# This is the default spack configuration file.
#
# Settings here are versioned with Spack and are intended to provide
# sensible defaults out of the box. Spack maintainers should edit this
# file to keep it current.
#
# Users can override these settings by editing the following files.
#
# Per-spack-instance settings (overrides defaults):
#   $SPACK_ROOT/etc/spack/config.yaml
#
# Per-user settings (overrides default and site settings):
#   ~/.spack/config.yaml
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
config:

  # Precedence of configuration scopes, high to low.
  # The user can override this paradoxically.
  # scopes: [user, spack, default]


  # This is the path to the root of the Spack install tree.
  # You can use $spack here to refer to the root of the spack instance.
  install_tree: $spack/opt/spack


  # Temporary locations Spack can try to use for builds.
  #
  # Spack will use the first one it finds that exists and is writable.
  # You can use $tempdir to refer to the system default temp directory
  # (as returned by tempfile.gettempdir()).
  #
  # A value of $local indicates that Spack should run builds directly
  # inside its install directory without staging them in temporary space.
  build_stage:
    - /usr/workspace/*/%u
    - $tempdir
    - /nfs/tmp2/%u
    - $local


  # Cache directory already downloaded source tarballs and archived
  # repositories. This can be purged with spack purge
  source_cache: $spack/var/spack/cache


  # Cache directory for miscellaneous files, like the package index.
  misc_cache: ~/.spack/cache


  # If this is false, tools like curl that use SSL will not verify
  # certifiates. (e.g., curl will use use the -k option)
  verify_ssl: true


  # If set to true, Spack will always check checksums after downloading
  # archives. If false, Spack skips the checksum step.
  checksum: true


  # If set to true, `spack install` and friends will NOT clean
  # potentially harmful variables from the build environment. Use wisely.
  dirty: false

Questions/Discussion

• Greg Becker

  • May still be having issues with ctrl-C during builds.

• Patrick Gartung

  • Presenting next week to HEP software foundation -- what's the status of the PRs?
    • Benedikt's install path and LD_LIBRARY_PATH PRs are in
    • binary caching going in next release (after security is implemented)
  • Peter's RPM support is also of interest to HEP people
    • We'll try to slate this for the spack release after SC16.

• Peter Scheibel

  • Working on trees of symlinks to make nicer-looking views of the install tree

• Mario Melara

  • NERSC interested in many of the 0.10 features
  • NERSC folks going to SC16 Spack tutorial

• Ben Boeckel

  • Continuing to work on Prolog-defined concretizer
  • Prolog concretizer can now resolve deps against what is installed
  • Look into how we can represent this in Python
    • simple python rules for concretization
    • prolog-like dep solver.