Telcon: 2022 02 02

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel
• Brian Van Essen
• Mark Krentel
• Wileam Phan
• Andrew Elble
• Nick Sly (LANL)
• Tom Payerle
• Amiya Maji
• Srinath Vadlamani
• Greg Becker
• Richarda Butler
• Massimilano Culpo
• Tammy Dahlgren

Agenda

• (Massimiliano) Sticky variants: some variants should not be aggressively tweaked by Spack: they can be set by the user but should not be messed with to improve the outcome of concretization WRT our optimization criteria.

  • Example: variant which decides whether normally-forbidden CUDA/compiler combinations are allowed
    • We think only the user should be able to set this
    • But Spack will tweak the variant
  • See: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/19736#issuecomment-943165642
  • See: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/28630

• (Mark) Could we add messages to the end of a concretization mentioning which preferences were not actually satisfied

  • (Andrew) Could highlight parts of the DAG which differ

• (Peter) Porting Spack-built binaries across systems: https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/28716

  • (Todd) Try adding os_compatible("rocky8", "centos8"). To concretize.lp
    • We should probably create a file to record more OS compatibilities and then automatically update that in asp.py

Agenda Items Next Week

• Possible continuation from last week: vendored dependencies
  • (Andrew) nvhpc installs CUDA, so which CUDA is being used if I install nvhpc with Spack?
  • (Wileam) Should nvhpc be modularized like oneAPI? This would partially solve the embedded CUDA issue, I think
• (Peter) Externals cut off dependencies: https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/9149#issuecomment-1020740273