# Notes for 2024-07-04 meeting

* date & time: Thu 7 July 2024 - 14:00 CEST (13:00 UTC)
* (every first Thursday of the month)
* venue: *(online, see mail for meeting link, or ask in Slack)*
* agenda:
- Quick introduction by new people
- EESSI-related meetings and events in last month
- Progress update per EESSI layer
- Update on build-and-deploy bot
- Update on EESSI production repository software.eessi.io
- Update on EESSI documentation
- Update on EESSI test suite
- EESSI as backend in Ramble
- Additional EESSI repositories: dev.eessi.io, riscv.eessi.io
- AWS/Azure sponsorship update
- Q&A

### Slides

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EESSI/meetings/main/meetings/EESSI_meeting_20240704.pdf

### Meeting notes

*(by Bob/Kenneth)*

#### Quick introduction by new people

#### EESSI-related meetings in last month

*(see slides)*

- Deucalion team is interested in working together and making EESSI available, regular calls are set up
- Brainstorm with someone from AMD about adding AMD ROCm support to EESSI
- All information is available at https://gitlab.com/eessi/support/-/issues/71
- Getting access to MIX300X instances in Azure will be very difficult
- Other (smaller?) AMD GPU instances will be publicly available soon

#### Progress update per EESSI layer

##### Filesystem layer

*(see slides)*

- CVMFS dashboard to keep an eye on CVMFS infrastructure
- internal dashboard initially
- we also want to expose some metrics to EESSI status page (like disk usage for Stratum-1 mirror server)

##### Compatibility layer

*(see slides)*

##### Software layer

*(see slides)*

- Lots of software has been added, also for the new CPU targets `x86_64/amd/zen4` and `aarch64/a64fx`
- CP2K has a dependency (libxsmm) that doesn't work on Arm / with specific GCC versions
- Trying to make this an optional dependency

##### Build-and-deploy bot

*(see slides)*

- For some PRs / bot instances the bot suddenly started adding lots of messages, see e.g. https://github.com/EESSI/software-layer/pull/630#issuecomment-2205679779
- Still a bit unclear what was causing this, but it seems like smee is sending out the same event multiple times?
- We should open an issue and document what we saw, and see if we can come up with a way to make the bot more robust against this (like don't re-process the same event multiple times)

##### software.eessi.io repository

*(see slides)*

##### EESSI documentation

*(see slides)*

- The available software page in the docs is automatically updated by a cronjob that opens a PR in case something is added

##### EESSI test suite

*(see slides)*

- Caspar is working on documentation for getting from a job script to a ReFrame test and to a portable ReFrame test

##### EESSI as backend in Ramble

*(see slides)*

##### Additional EESSI repositories: dev.eessi.io, riscv.eessi.io

*(see slides)*

- The ultimate goal here is to merge the RISC-V stack into the production repository
- It's too early to already do this now, also because older toolchains don't work on RISC-V
- Maybe this can be considered for one of the next EESSI versions
- We're only building for `riscv64/generic` right now, more issues may pop up when we start building for RISC-V CPUs with vector instructions
- PR 618 revealed that the CI that tests the `eessi_container.sh` script has a bug (due to a wrong regular expression), but this can/will be easily fixed in the same PR.

#### AWS/Azure sponsored credits

*(see slides)*

#### Events

*(see slides)*

#### Q&A

- The monthly meeting in August will be skipped due to summer holidays
- interest in meeting on support for AMD ROCm by Hugo & Jurij
- will probably scheduled some time in Sept'24
- Jurij tested EESSI on CentOS Stream 10, and things worked fine
- using CVMFS nightly build for Fedora 40, building from source doesn't work yet (linking issue)
- any other interest in Varnish as proxy for CernVM-FS?
- https://github.com/EESSI/filesystem-layer/issues/194