EasyBuild


9th EasyBuild User Meeting

23-25 April 2024 @ Umeå, Sweden

sponsored by:   Umeå University    HPCNow!    HPC2N    INUITS

Group picture at 9th EasyBuild User Meeting (2024)
(group picture from 9th EasyBuild User Meeting in Umeå - April 2024)

Practical info - Registration - Organisation - Program - Sponsors - Contact

EasyBuild is a software build and installation framework that allows you to manage (scientific) software on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems in an efficient way.

The EasyBuild User Meeting is an open and highly interactive event that provides a great opportunity to meet fellow EasyBuild enthusiasts, discuss related topics, and learn about new aspects of the tool.

It is intended for people that are already familiar with EasyBuild, ranging from occasional users to EasyBuild core developers, maintainers, and experts. Topics will be less introductory in nature than during other events like EasyBuild tutorials.

The program includes presentations by both EasyBuild users and developers, as well as talks about open source projects relevant to the EasyBuild community.

Practical information

The 9th EasyBuild User Meeting will be held Tuesday-Thursday 23-25 April 2024 in Umeå (Sweden).

The venue is Umeå University, Samhällsvetarhuset (Social Science building).

This is an open meeting, anybody interested is welcome to join.
Attendance is free of cost, but registration is required (see below).

Recommended hotels

(more info soon)

Zoom & YouTube

We intend to provide live streaming of all presentations that are part of the EUM'24 agenda, via Zoom and the EasyBuild YouTube channel.

Remote attendees will be able to join Zoom sessions for interactive discussions with the speakers.
Note that only registered attendees will have access to the Zoom sessions!

We also intend to record all sessions, and will make the recordings available shortly after the live presentations, via the EasyBuild YouTube channel.

Q&A via #eum channel in EasyBuild Slack

Remote attendees will be ale to submit questions via the #eum channel in the EasyBuild Slack. Comments in YouTube will be disabled for the live streaming events.

If you are not logged in to the EasyBuild Slack yet, you can request an invitation to join via https://easybuild.io/join-slack.

Registration

If you plan to attend one or more presentations (on-site or remotely), you must register.
Seats for on-site attendance are limited.

Although attendance is free and open to anyone, having a good view on how well the different sessions will be attended is important for us to be well prepared.

To register your attendance, please visit:

https://event.ugent.be/registration/eum24

Updates and practical information will be sent via email to anyone who registered.

Registration closes Wed 10 April 2024.

Organisation

Program

The 9th EasyBuild User Meeting consists of 3 days of presentations and hands-on sessions.

Please note that all times are in Central European Summer Time (CEST, equivalent to UTC+2).

We intentionally left ample time in between talks to allow for Q&A, interactive discussions, switching between speakers and breaks.

Overview

(subject to change!)


[Tue 23 Apr 2024 - 09:00-10:30 CEST - on-site]
Meet & greet + registration

Informal meet & greet + registration session, coffee/tea/cookies will be available.



[Tue 23 Apr 2024 - 10:30-10:45 CEST - on-site]
Welcome to the 9th EasyBuild User Meeting (EUM'24)

Overview of agenda + practical info + sponsors



[Tue 23 Apr 2024 - 10:45-12:30 CEST - on-site]
EasyBuild State of the Union
by Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)

Let's look back at what was changed in EasyBuild in the last year, how we are doing right now, what we are currently working on, which challenges are ahead, and the enhancements and changes in EasyBuild we envision for the future.

In addition, the highlights of the last EasyBuild User Survey will be covered in this talk.



[Tue 23 Apr 2024 - 13:30-15:00 CEST - on-site]
Keynote: EUPILOT: towards an All-European RISC-V-based HPC demonstrator
by Miquel Pericas (Chalmers University of Technology)

The European Union has embarked on a mission to develop a sovereign supercomputing industry with a focus on open source and the RISC-V ISA. Several EuroHPC projects, including EPI, EUPILOT, and eProcessor, are currently developing a full software and hardware stack based on RISC-V. In this talk I will describe why the EU is interested in RISC-V and I will provide an overview of some of the EuroHPC projects in which Chalmers is involved. The main focus will be on the EUPILOT project, which aims to deliver the first All-European open source and open standard based software and hardware integrated HPC system. In addition, I will survey several SDVs (Software Development Vehicles) that are currently available for RISC-V development, both in and outside of EUPILOT. Finally, I will describe some of Chalmers' R&D contributions related to RISC-V. I will conclude the talk with some thoughts on the future of RISC-V supercomputing.



[Tue 23 Apr 2024 - 15:30-17:00 CEST - on-site]
EasyBuild 5.0
by Simon Branford (University of Birmingham)

A detailed overview of what has changed in EasyBuild 5.0, and what you will need to be aware of to transition from EasyBuild 4.x to EasyBuild 5.0.



[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 09:00-09:20 CEST - on-site]
EasyBuild site presentation: Umeå University
by Åke Sandgren (Umeå University)


[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 09:20-09:40 CEST - on-site]
EasyBob, the friendly software installation bot
by Jörg Saßmannshausen (Imperial College London, UK)

Installation of software on a heterogeneous cluster consisting out of several CPU and GPU architectures can be quite a challenge when done manually. At Imperial College London, we are facing this issue as our clusters consist of several Intel CPU micro-architectures, some AMD nodes and a healthy mixture of GPU nodes as well. To make the mix more interesting, the cluster internally has an IPv6 network only.

So we came up with an automatic installation program called EasyBob. EasyBob not only allows us to do the installation micro-architecture specific, taking into account different CPU/GPU nodes, it is also the 'backend' of the self-service portal where users can request software to be installed via our ticket system in the future.

This presentation gives an insight into the mechanics of the bot, how it can be configured and how it is used.



[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 09:40-10:00 CEST - on-site]
Baskerville @ University of Birmingham
by Simon Branford (University of Birmingham)

Baskerville is the EPSRC/UKRI funded, Tier 2 system at the University of Birmingham. In this talk Simon will talk about this system and how EasyBuild enabled rapid deployment of the initial software stack.


[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 10:00-10:30 CEST - on-site]
EasyBuilding PyTorch
by Alexander Grund (TU Dresden)


[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 11:00-11:30 CEST - remote]
Recent advances in ReFrame
by Vasileios Karakasis (NVIDIA)

In this talk, I will give a status update on ReFrame presenting the new features and enhancements since last year’s EUM. I will also give an outlook for the future developments.



[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 11:30-12:00 CEST - on-site]
Blablador
by Alexandre Strube (Jülich Supercomputing Centre)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) like chatGPT have demonstrated their potential for generating human-like text and reasoning about topics with natural language. However, applying these advanced LLMs requires significant compute resources and expertise that are out of reach for most academic researchers. To make scientific LLMs more accessible, we have developed Helmholtz Blablador, an open-source inference server optimized for serving predictions from customized scientific LLMs.

Blablador provides the serving infrastructure to make models accessible via a simple API without managing servers, firewalls, authentication or infrastructure. Researchers can add their pretrained LLMs to the central hub. Other scientists can then query the collective model catalog via web or using the popular OpenAI api to add LLM functionality in other tools, like programming IDEs.

This enables a collaborative ecosystem for scientific LLMs:

Besides that, one can train, quantize, fine-tune and evaluate LLMs directly with Blablador. The inference server is available at http://helmholtz-blablador.fz-juelich.de.



[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 12:00-12:30 CEST - on-site]
How I became an EasyBuild maintainer
by Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford)


[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 13:15-13:30 CEST - remote]
A splash of color
by Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

A bit of color and some minor and major productivity hacks!



[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 13:30-15:00 CEST - on-site]
EasyBuild site talks



[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 15:30-16:15 CEST - remote]
Spack update
by Todd Gamblin (LLNL, US) - remote


[Wed 24 Apr 2024 - 16:15-17:00 CEST - on-site]
tour of Umeå University datacenter
by Åke Sandgren (Umeå University)


[Thu 25 Apr 2024 - 09:00-09:30 CEST - on-site]
Introduction to EESSI
by Lara Peeters (HPC-UGent, Belgium)

Introduction to the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) project - https://eessi.io.



[Thu 25 Apr 2024 - 09:30-10:00 CEST - on-site]
Contributing to EESSI
by Pedro Santos Neves (Univ. of Groningen)

Learn how to contribute software to EESSI, including the EESSI build environment and the build-and-deploy bot.



[Thu 25 Apr 2024 - 10:00-10:30 CEST - on-site]
Installing datasets
by Sam Moors (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)


[Thu 25 Apr 2024 - 11:00-12:30 CEST - on-site]
Hands-on with EESSI

Hands-on sessions with EESSI, from different perspectives:



[Thu 25 Apr 2024 - 13:30-14:30 CEST - remote]
Ecosyste.ms: Exploring Open Source Software Landscapes
by Andrew Nesbitt - remote

Explore the mapping of open-source software and its usage with Ecosyste.ms. Gain valuable insights into the diverse world of OSS, fostering collaboration and enhancing tooling across software ecosystems.



[Thu 25 Apr 2024 - 14:30-15:00 CEST - on-site]
EESSI beyond the basics: GPU support, test suite, GitHub Actions, ...
by Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)



[Thu 25 Apr 2024 - 15:30-16:15 CEST - remote]
CernVM-FS experience report
by Bart Oldeman (Digital Research Alliance of Canada)


Sponsors

              

Contact

In case of questions, please contact eum@lists.ugent.be.

EUM'23 (London) - EUM'22 (virtual) - EUM'21 (virtual) - EUM'20 (Barcelona)
EUM'19 (Louvain-la-Neuve) - EUM'18 (Amsterdam) - EUM'17 (Jülich) - EUM'16 (Ghent)