Meeting 2016 08

August 2016 Open MPI Developer's Meeting

Logistics:

• Start: 9am, Tue Aug 16, 2016
• Finish: 1pm, Thu Aug 18, 2016
• Location: IBM facility, Dallas, TX
• Attendance fee: $50/person, see registration link below

Until IBM fills in more logistics details, you can see the wiki page for the prior meeting at the IBM Facility -- it'll likely be similar

Attendees

Please both register at EventBrite ($50/person) and add your name to the wiki list below if you are coming to the meeting:

1. Jeff Squyres, Cisco
2. Howard Pritchard, LANL
3. Geoffrey Paulsen, IBM
4. Ralph Castain, Intel
5. George Bosilca, UTK (17 and 18)
6. Josh Hursey, IBM
7. Edgar Gabriel, UHouston
8. Takahiro Kawashima, Fujitsu
9. Shinji Sumimoto, Fujitsu
10. Brian Barrett, Amazon Web Services
11. Nathan Hjelm, LANL
12. Sameh Sharkawi, IBM (17 and 18)
13. Mark Allen, IBM
14. ...please fill in your name here if you're going to attend...

Topics

• Plans for v2.1.0 release
  • Need community to contribute what they want in v2.1.0
  • Want to release by end of 2016 at the latest
• After v2.1.0 release, should we merge from master to the v2.x branch?
  • Only if there are no backwards compatibility issues (!)
  • This would allow us to close the divergence/gap from master to v2.x, but keep life in the v2.x series (which is attractive to some organizations)
  • Alternatively, we might want to fork and create a new 3.x branch.
• Present information about IBM Spectrum MPI, processes, etc.
  • May have PR's ready to discuss requested changes, but schedule is tight in July / August for us.
• MTT updates / future direction
• Migration to new cloud services update for website, database, etc.
  • Spend time migrating Jenkins: IU -> Ralph's server
  • Spend time migrating MTT: IU -> Ralph's server
  • What do we want to do after Ralph's server for Jenkins and MTT?
    • MTT: new server / cherrypy
    • Jenkins: Java
  • Revamp / consolidate: ompi master:contrib/ -- there's currently 3 subdirs that should really be disambiguated and overlap removed. Perhaps name subdirs by the DNS name where they reside / operate?
    • infrastructure
    • build server
    • nightly
  • Spend time documenting where everything is / how it is setup
  • Fix OMPI timeline page: https://www.open-mpi.org/software/ompi/versions/timeline.php
  • Possible umbrella non-profit organization
• How to help alleviate "drowning in CI data" syndrome?
  • One example: https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/pull/1801
  • One suggestion: should we actively market for testers in the community to help wrangle this stuff?
  • If Jenkins detects an error, can we get Jenkins to retry the tests without the PR changes, and then compare the results to see if the PR itself is introducing a new error?
• PMIx roadmap discussions
• Thread-safety design
  • Need some good multi-threaded performance tests (per Nathan and Artem discussion)
    • Do we need to write them ourselves?
  • Review/define the path forward
• Fujitsu status
  • Memory consumption evaluation
  • MTT status
  • PMIx status
• MCA support as a separate package?
  • Now that we have multiple projects (PMIx, Warewulf) and others using MCA plugins, does it make sense to create a separate repo/package for MCA itself? Integrating MCA into these projects was modestly painful (e.g., identifying what other infrastructure - such as argv.h/c - needs to be included) - perhaps a more packaged solution will make it simpler.
  • Need to "tag" the component libraries with their project name as library confusion is becoming more prevalent as OMPI begins to utilize MCA-based packages such as PMIx
• Plans for folding ompi-release Github repo back into ompi Github repo
  • https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/issues/1512
• (Possibly) Remove atomics from OBJ_RETAIN/OBJ_RELEASE in the THREAD_SINGLE case.
  • @nysal said he would look at this.
  • See https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/issues/1902.
  • NTH: Already done. We did this in 1.8.x/1.10.x but never committed to updating master.
• Continue --net mpirun CLI option discussion from Feb 2016 meeting
  • Originally an IBM proposal.
  • Tied to issues of "I just want to use network X" user intent, without needing to educate users on the complexities of PML, MTL, BTL, COLL, ...etc.
  • We didn't come to any firm conclusions in August.
• OpenMPI non-profit?
• MPI_Reduce_Local - move into coll framework.
• Revive btl/openib memalign hooks?
• Discuss appropriate default settings for openib BTL
  • Email thread on performance conflicts between RMA/openib and SM/Vader
• Ralph offers to give presentation on "Flash Provisioning of Clusters", if folks are interested