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: there will likely be an attendance fee (similar to the MPI Forum). Details TBD.

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

• Yes, Geoff/IBM is filling out paperwork, etc now.
  • The paperwork asked if we're charging a fee to hold the event. I'm unsure of the ramifications, for now I said 'no', since we're not certain.

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. Stan Graves, IBM
5. Ralph Castain, Intel
6. George Bosilca, UTK (17 and 18)
7. Josh Hursey, IBM
8. Edgar Gabriel, UHouston
9. Takahiro Kawashima, Fujitsu
10. Shinji Sumimoto, Fujitsu
11. Brian Barrett, Amazon Web Services
12. Nathan Hjelmn, LANL
13. ...please fill in your name here if you're going to attend...

Topics

• 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.
  • 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
  • PMIx
  • MTT
• 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