meeting July 2nd 2020

slides available at https://github.com/EESSI/meetings/blob/master/meetings/EESSI_meeting_20200702.pdf

Maxim (SURF) briefly introduced himself, planned to help out with software layer (together with Caspar)
Davide (Microsoft) joining as EasyBuild maintainer

see https://github.com/EESSI/docs/tree/master/talks/20200618_HPCKP20
lots of interest, over a dozen people joined the Slack/mailing list via https://www.eessi-hpc.org/join/
Oriol: recording should be available soon (this month)

logo, made by graphical designer
- see https://github.com/EESSI/docs/blob/master/docs/img/logos/EESSI_logo_horizontal.png
website: https://www.eessi-hpc.org
docs: https://eessi.github.io/docs
Twitter account: https://twitter.com/eessi_hpc
quote requested to finish up logo work (raw materials), align website with logo, get stickers printed
- Jaco (Dell Technologies) may be able to cover those costs

working pilot setup with Stratum-0, Stratum-1 at Univ. of Groningen
automated setup with Ansible playbooks
procedure is documented in README of filesystem-layer repo
tested by Thomas at UiO
tested by Jaco on several platforms, including WSL (Linux env in Windows client)
now also .deb/.rpm packages available for EESSI CVMFS configuration
- see https://github.com/EESSI/filesystem-layer/pull/24
- only central CVMFS package + this EESSI config package + some local configuring required to get started
(Singularity) container in the works to allow easy testing
- see https://github.com/EESSI/filesystem-layer/issues/10
- NOT for production usage (w.r.t. CVMFS caching, etc.)
- also look into Docker container (which can be used via Singularity)?
TODO:
- HTTPS support?
- look into publisher & gateway nodes: https://cvmfs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/cpt-repository-gateway.html

experimenting with Gentoo Prefix bootstrap installation
- bootstrap script is not 100% reliable
  - ran into issues with broken bzip2 installation, circular dependency, silly typos, ...
  - not all problems are caught upstream quickly (although they do have some CI setup)
  - but response from Prefix developers in case of problems is really quick
- we may need a better way of controlling the Prefix, especially for a production setup
  - Alex: using snapshot of Prefix repository may help
  - current approach of getting Prefix installed with bootstrap script and hoping for the best is good enough for pilot setup?
  - contact Prefix mailing list to ask about how we could get more control over the installation mechanism if we wanted to?
Prefix installation for pilot setup now available at /cvmfs/pilot.eessi-hpc.org/test/gentoo/2020/startprefix
- documentation to start using it available in README in compatibility-layer repo
- see also https://github.com/EESSI/compatibility-layer/pull/4
planning to leverage ComputeCanada's gentoo-overlay repository for additional Gentoo packages (ebuilds)
Lua + Lmod is now a manual installation (not part of Prefix)

brainstorm sessions with Kenneth/Caspar/Alan on June 9th and June 26th on organizing software-layer repo
- planning to leverage easyconfigs/easyblocks from EasyBuild release as much as possible
- customization specific to EESSI project via EasyBuild hooks
- only include easyconfigs/easyblocks in software-layer repo if we have to
  - try to actively contribute back to central EasyBuild repositories
working on script that consumes a "build list" which defines the software stack + script to process it
- idea is to leverage EasyBuild as a library
- see https://github.com/EESSI/software-layer/pull/5
also working on init script to easily set up environment to start using the EESSI software stack
- initialize Prefix environment, set any additional required environment variables, run correct module use based on host architecture (CPU/GPU)
- see https://github.com/EESSI/software-layer/pull/4

Which license do we use for the scripts we produce ourselves?
- need to take into account projects we leverage (anything that leverages EasyBuild => GPLv2)
Some control mechanism to ensure we don't redistribute software we're not allowed to?

Anyone who submits a join request via https://www.eessi-hpc.org/join/ is added to Slack + mailing list and is welcome to join the meetings
also outside of Europe
active contributors can get write permissions to GitHub repositories at some point

Kenneth: software layer (driver script + init script), but also 3 weeks of vacation
Caspar/Maxim: software layer
Xavier: testing in different layers
- has expertise with OpenFOAM, useful for pilot setup
Mark: test filesystem in OpenStack cloud env
Thomas: more testing with filesystem and compatibility layer
- national project in Norway w.r.t. setting up shared software stack
- hope to get people involved in EESSI in that context
Henk-Jan:
- University of Groningen has agreed to fund infrastructure for pilot phase of EESSI w.r.t. hosting Stratum-0

Provide feedback