# 20210805 meeting notes

* date & time: Thu August 5th 2021 - 2pm CEST (12:00 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 in last month
- Progress update per EESSI layer
- 2021.06 version of pilot repository
- AWS/Azure sponsorship update
- Q&A

### Slides

* see https://github.com/EESSI/meetings/blob/main/meetings/EESSI_meeting_20210805.pdf

### Meeting notes

*(by Kenneth)*

#### Quick introduction by new people

- No new people

#### EESSI-related meetings in last month

- Azure sponsorship for EESSI kickoff meeting
- some confusion about the kind of service EESSI provides
- Alan clarified what type of access we would ideally need (not just a VM)
- the intention is that we get our own sub-subscription in SURF Research Cloud

#### Progress update per EESSI layer

##### Filesystem layer

- A fix is in place for updating in place for CernVM-FS (useful for things like a glibc update)
- No need to opt-in on the client side
- Documentation still needed

##### Compatibility layer

- Security checks are done 3 times a week by a bot, notifications are given in a private channel on Slack
- Could have our own runner to avoid exceeding limits for private repo on GitHub Actions
- Installation of updates is still a manual process

##### Software layer

- Running into problems with Java in 2021.06
- glibc in compat layer is recent enough for this to cause problems
- patchelf can solve this (which is what Compute Canada does)
- could build from source...but that is not easy
- Bob briefly looked into this
-

- Alan: update on MPI override stuff (see issue XXX)
- Potential ABI compatibility problem with hwloc pulled in via OpenMPI
- WI4MPI road also looks promising to easily switch between different MPI libraries (https://github.com/cea-hpc/wi4mpi)

#### AWS/Azure update

- ...

#### 2021.06 version of pilot repository

- basically same state as it was last meeting
- need to implement fix for problem with Java to make progress

#### AWS /Arm hackathon

- Overview of recent week long hackathon
- Some YT videos available
- 205 test cases
- Additional links in presentation

#### Q&A

- AlphaFold (https://github.com/deepmind/alphafold) might be an interesting addition to EESSI, since it is generating a lot of interest (especially since installation from source is not easy)
- Might be an interesting case to show the performance difference