Dear EasyBuilders and lmod users, I have a question for the community. Currently EasyBuild supports to deploy its software stack in a hierarchical manner, as intended and supported by lmod (ie: load compiler, that expands $MODULEPATH and the MPIs become visible, load an MPI, which expands $MODULEPATH again).
There is a very significant number of MPIs that are ABI compatible (MPICH, MVAPICH, Intel MPI, ParaStationMPI and possibly 1 or 2 more). I don't know if OpenMPI-based MPI runtimes are also ABI compatible, but I would guess there is a big chance that they are. My question is how would you feel about expanding the MPI's $MODULEPATH based on ABI compatibility, rather than MPI_vendor/version. That way one could offer many MPIs without needing to mirror the whole SW stack in all MPI branches. That could simplify SW management significantly. Caveats I can think of are: -One would have to be careful regarding which MPI is used to compile the stack. MPI compiler wrappers are different, and might add different compiler and/or linker flags. -Some MPIs, despite being ABI compatible, might offer different capabilities (eg: CUDA-awareness). I guess in these cases it makes sense to try to ensure that loading packages that depend in particular MPI capabilities, actually load the correct MPI runtime as a dependency, instead of making vague assumptions like "the correct MPI is already loaded because otherwise the package won't be visible in the environment". Similarly, one could think of a similar approach for compilers, to allow drop-in compiler replacements. Let's say icc 2018.2 is used to compile a given branch of the hierarchy. If that compiler has a bug that is fixed in 2018.3, right now the whole SW stack needs to be recompiled in a separate branch of the hierarchy. However, with a drop-in replacement one could install the latest version of the compiler but still reuse the hierarchy compiled with 2018.2. Needless to say, this needs to be done carefully. However, the possibility seems interesting. Am I missing something? How do you feel about this? Best, Damian -- Dr. Damian Alvarez Juelich Supercomputing Centre Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH 52425 Juelich, Germany ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH 52425 Juelich Sitz der Gesellschaft: Juelich Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Dueren Nr. HR B 3498 Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: MinDir Dr. Karl Eugen Huthmacher Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt (Vorsitzender), Karsten Beneke (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Bolt, Prof. Dr. Sebastian M. Schmidt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
