On 17/1/19 7:32 am, Faraz Hussain wrote:
Some folks I work with are using EasyBuild but I am not sure what to make of it.
I used easybuild for a number of years at VLSCI and at Swinburne and I can say that whilst the "easy" can be a bit of a misnomer it is very powerful and does simplify the job of managing HPC software.
You want OpenFOAM? Pick the version, tell it to build it in robot mode and it'll go off and build it from the compiler all the way to the finished install.
What I really like is that it codifies a lot of the knowledge about building these applications so even if you don't use it yourself the easyconfigs can help for software you may be struggling to build. The community around it is also strong and helpful.
They also use checksums for the files they download to confirm nothing went wrong, it also has the useful side-effect of catching projects who spot a bug in a release and then re-release it without updating the version number. :-)
One complication I did find is when you build things that you want to apply custom configuration to - like ensuring that all your OpenMPI versions are built with Slurm integration enabled for example - it means modifying all those easyconfigs in advance. I don't know if that's changed recently.
One other nit is that it can lead to an explosion of versions of GCC, various MPI's, etc because the easyconfigs encode all those. What we did was use custom versions and pick a GCC v6, v7, etc version to use as well as a version of Python2, Python3, Perl, etc for those modules.
What I liked is that it is very flexible - I really liked the way I could create an easyconfig for a bundle of Python modules for a group and they would just load that one bundle to get everything they wanted. It's not embedded into the existing Python install so you can do this over and over again and not accidentally upgrade one groups versions of a module simply because another group wants a module that depends on a later version.
They also have a sense of humour, Kenneth Hoste the lead developer has a great talk called "How to make package managers cry" which goes into detail about how to make your software hard to install, with examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSemlYagjIU Hope that's useful! All the best, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Berkeley, CA, USA _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
