On 12/05/2013 10:43 PM, Olaf Walter wrote: > Dear easybuilders, > > I have made my first experiences with easybuild, and tried a few things. I am > really happy that I ran across your project, it is great work. But some > questions remain, maybe you can give me some advice. > > (1) choosing a (single) toolchain > We run a cluster for Bioinformatics software, with RHEL 6.4 and 10 GbE but no > Infiniband. If I understood correctly, goalf-1.1.0-no-OFED is the toolchain > of choice, right?
no, goalf toolchain has some flaws and we do not encourage anymore use of it. currently I use goolf-1.4.10 for all builds on my laptop, and since yesterday we switched form ictce-4.1.13 to ictce-5.5.0 for intel compiler builds. So expect all new easyconfigs I add to be in these 2 toolchains. > > (2) what if there is no eb for my toolchain? > I noticed that for some programs, there are no goalf-1.1.0-no-OFED > easybuilds. Amoung these, there are essentials like Perl. > I understand that there will be conflicts if users try load a goalf-based > module (say, Perl) and a goolf-based module (say Python) at the same time > (zlib). Would you recommend to build Perl with goolf-1.4.10, or to create a > Perl-5.16.3-goalf-1.1.0-no-OFED.eb myself? Maybe there is a reason that there > is no such easyconfig? Should I trust the --try-options? > staying within the gcc and intel toolchains I frequently do a --try-toolchain=ictce,5.5.0 if this works out, consider opening a pull request with the newly generated .eb file. Sometimes some manual tweaking might be needed. > (3) OS Independence > Besides the fact that easybuild bootstraps its own compiler, it still uses > some OS ressources. For example, if I use GCC/4.6.3 to compile helloworld.c > on a compute node (with no development tools installed), ld complains about > crt1.o not being there. So I am wondering: To what extend are the resulting > packages OS-independent? If I build on RHEL 6.4, will they run on RHEL 6.3, > 6.5, RHEL 5 (or even Ubuntu)? I have not tested this, but they are still os specific, some things we can not fix, like the infiniband kernel modules etc. The reason EasyBuild was created was to be make it as easy to do a recompile on a news system. Since we build everything architecture specific chances are the binaries will not be able to run on the cpu of your laptop anyway. Just rerun the eb command is what we encourage. > > (4) Best practice for new releases > How would you deploy new releases of software, for example when a new release > of easybuild comes out? I decided that a new release would go into a new > EASYBUILD_INSTALLPATH, and I inform users to update their .modulerc to > contain the new modulepath. Is this what you would recommend? > We put everything in the same modulepath, so new and old versions of of the same software are available by just doing a module load / module swap. Since you can install EasyBuild with EasyBuild this is also what we do. Regards Jens Timmerman
