Telcon: 2024 02 28

Wednesday February 28th, 9am PT (UTC -8:00)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Davide DelVento
• Gary Lawson (SNL)
• Brian Van Essen
• Jakov Petrina
• Luke (UO)
• Mark Krentel
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Stuart Baxley
• Tammy Dahlgren

Agenda

• https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/42535
  • Module autoloading: spack loads too many modules for some users (more than necessary)
• Q&A
  • Davide: Have 3 versions of spack
    • Don't want them to share ~/.spack
    • Max: you can do spack -C dir
      • Davide: does . .../setup-env.sh use config?
      • Peter: no (so it's "safe" to use)
    • Max: there is also SPACK_USER_CONFIG_PATH
      • Each spack instance can customize this env var
      • You also need to set export SPACK_USER_CACHE_PATH=...
      • and you can disable ~/.spack:

        export SPACK_DISABLE_LOCAL_CONFIG=true
        

    • See also: https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html#overriding-local-configuration
  • Luke: with E4S environment, a number of packages just expose libraries
    • When we load them we want them to update LD_LIBRARY_PATH
    • But only some of them
    • e.g. we want trilinos to update LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but not its dependencies
    • This is with spack load
      • Using Spack version from end of Jan.
    • Peter: spack load --only=package trilinos should avoid loading dependencies
    • Davide: I have spack generate lmod modules which have this behavior
    • Luke: made issue https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/42912 (and Davide will add example config there)
  • Brian: want to update Spack and use new versions of CUDA
    • There are error messages about CUDA versions
    • Peter: can you submit this error message to the slack error-messages channel
    • Peter: possible culprit is constraints in lib/spack/spack/build_systems/cuda.py
    • Max: you can try reconcretizing with ^cuda+allow-unsupported-compilers
  • Gary Lawson: related to discussion topic about autoloading too many modules
    • We had this problem with survey
      • Created a view to consolidate py-* packages
      • Wrote a script to edit module config file for survey
      • Adding a line for just survey module to do prepend_path to PYTHON_PATH
    • Spack didn't used to do this (i.e. autoload things)
      • Max: back in Spack 0.18
      • Stuart: for us the behavior changed between 0.20.0 and now
    • Gary/Stuart: Overall we want to modify PYTHON_PATH from all dependencies, but not load modules associated w/those dependencies
    • Harmen was looking into the possibility of hidden modules
      • We do this for TCL
      • We don't do this for LMOD though
      • Luke: logic for hiding modules w/TCL requires a new TCL
        • There may be a PR for supporting this w/older TCL