On 02/07/2021 19:38, Davide Vanzo wrote:
Hello EasyBuilders!
I am trying to configure EasyBuild to allow users to install software
locally while using the existing cluster-wide stack (distributed via
CVMFS) for dependencies.
Here is the relevant EB configuration on the clients:
allow-loaded-modules (F) = EasyBuild
detect-loaded-modules (F) = purge
envvars-user-modules (F) = USER_STACK_ROOT, HOME
installpath (F) = /home/hpcadmin/EasyBuild
minimal-toolchains (F) = True
module-depends-on (F) = True
module-naming-scheme (F) = HierarchicalMNS
prefix (F) = /home/hpcadmin/EasyBuild
robot-paths (F) =
<cvmfs_stack_root>/EasyBuild/custom_easyconfigs,
<cvmfs_stack_root>/EasyBuild/software/EasyBuild/4.4.0/easybuild/easyconfigs
rpath (F) = True
subdir-user-modules (F) = EasyBuild/modules
The cluster-wide stack root path is indicated above as: cvmfs_stack_root
When a user wants to build and locally install a piece of software and
the toolchain is already available in the cluster-wide stack, the
expectation is that EB pulls the existing dependencies from the stack
and only builds/installs locally the missing dependencies and finally
the desired software. The generated local module will then appear in
Lmod thanks to the subdir-user-modules option.
When EasyBuild tries to resolve the dependencies, it pulls the list of
installed modules from:
* the paths in MODULEPATH
* the <installpath>/<subdir_modules> as specified in the EB configuration
In my case this correspond to the following paths:
* <cvmfs_stack_root>/EasyBuild/modules/all/Core
* /home/hpcadmin/EasyBuild/modules/all
The problem with this is that EB only considers stack modules in the
Core directory and not on the rest of the hierarchical tree (Compiler,
MPI), causing the entire toolchain to be re-built locally.
The solution would be to add <cvmfs_stack_root>/EasyBuild/modules/all to
MODULEPATH at build time.
What am I missing?
Nothing, that's the correct approach currently.
EasyBuild relies on what we call the "full" module name (Core/GCC/9.3.0
for example, or Compiler/GCC/9.3.0/OpenMPI/4.0.2, where the "short"
(user-facing) module names are GCC/9.3.0 and OpenMPI/4.0.2) to check
whether modules are already installed in a hierarchy, and there's a good
reason for it.
It may be possible to avoid this, but this requires a bit of work to be
done in framework, since we probably rely on this in a number of places...
We discussed this recently in the EasyBuild conf call, and we agreed
that a short-term easy solution could be to let EasyBuild automatically
add <prefix> to $MODULEPATH when it notices <prefix>/Core is in there.
See also https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/issues/3703
regards,
Kenneth
Davide
