EasyBuild on LUMI one year later: Successes and frustrations
Channel: EasyBuild
Date: 01/05/2023

by Kurt Lust (University of Antwerp, LUMI User Support Team) at the 8th EasyBuild User Meeting (EUM'23, https://easybuild.io/eum23).

Slides available at https://easybuild.io/eum23/eum23_001_keynote_ian_cutress.pdf

Abstract:

LUMI (https://lumi-supercomputer.eu) is one of the EuroHPC JU pre-exascale systems. The supercomputer is hosted by a consortium of eleven European countries, led by Finland, and is in CSC's data centre in Kajaani, Finland. LUMI is an HPE-Cray EX system fully based on AMD processor technology. Most of the compute power comes from 2,560 compute nodes with four AMD MI250X GPUs, but the cluster also contains over 1,500 regular compute nodes, and partition for data-analysis and visualization. Storage consists of 5 Lustre file systems (one flash-based and four with conventional hard disks) and an object storage system. Much of the system is now in regular operation, though some services still must be developed. A small extension of the system is coming up this spring.

During the EasyBuild 2022 User Meeting we discussed how we integrated EasyBuild with the HPE-Cray Programming Environment used on the system and developed an EasyBuild configuration that enables users to easily build their own software installation on top of what is already installed centrally. Our first experiences with this system are positive. It has enabled us to easily deliver specific configurations to users or test new packages. The transition to installing GPU software was also fairly smooth. And we've also built up a simple but efficient documentation system for our software catalogue.

After developing and using EasyBuild for nearly two years on LUMI, we have run into some annoyances and features that we are missing or that are underdeveloped for the usage scenario that we have on LUMI. As it is probably not too late yet for a discussion about features for EasyBuild 5, we will also spend some time during the presentation highlighting those.