Next pilot version

[ocaisa]

There are a number of interesting developments related to GPU support that may warrant a new pilot. There's the PR that is open to support GPUs in general #172 and also a recent change in how OpenMPI is built with EasyBuild (easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs#15528) which will have a big impact on our ability to fully support GPU software, including GPU-aware MPI on all hardware that utilises UCX (unfortunately libfabric is, for now, a second class citizen in this respect).

[ocaisa]

We'll need to wait a little to get the 2022a toolchains, but once we have those we could begin work on pilot version 2022.06

[boegel]

@ocaisa The fix in easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs#15528 is for foss/2021b, which we don't have yet in the 2021.12 pilot.
So is there actually a need to start a new pilot? What needs to change in compat layer or directory structure?

[ocaisa]

From #172, we need at least a new Lmod, and we need the tools in the compat layer to extract rpm/deb.

Given that 2021.12 is now stable (since it moved to latest), I thought these kinds of changes should happen in a new pilot version...

[trz42]

Just curious, how about using the EESSI bot for building the next pilot?

[ocaisa]

In #172, we've discovered that all the OS packages for the CUDA compat package contain the same libraries (see easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs#15892 (comment)), that's allowed us to ignore the OS and just focus on the architecture. Only the RHEL rpms contain all archs (x86_64, ARM and Power) and RHEL8 is supported until 2029 so grabbing the RPMs from there seems like a good default.

p7zip can unpack RPMs and that ships with EasyBuild so we can include it in EESSI, this removes the need to change the compat layer to support this.

[bedroge]

This is no longer relevant, so I'm closing the issue.