E4S at NERSC 2022, Aug 25, 2022

Introduction

NERSC and ECP Training are co-hosting a one-day E4S at NERSC training event on August 25, 2022. This session will provide users with an overview of E4S and how one can use the E4S stack at NERSC. We will have a hands-on component on how to deploy your own software stack using Spack, along with an E4S tutorial. There will be numerous talks from ECP leadership on the different focus efforts pertaining to E4S and how it aligns with the ECP project. This session is a continuation of E4S at DOE Facilties with Deep Dive at NERSC (though this previous session is not a prerequisite for attending).

This session will be held in hybrid mode (both in-person and online), and is open to all ECP members and all users of NERSC, ALCF, and OLCF.   

The Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) is a curated collection of open-source software packages for high-performance computing. The E4S stack includes more than 100 HPC applications, libraries and tools, MPI, development tools such as HPCToolkit, TAU, PAPI, and math libraries including PETSC and Trilinos. E4S is available for use via containers, buildcache, AWS EC2 image, and facility tuned Spack environments in the form of spack.yaml. E4S provides a new model for providing a standard set of software stacks to HPC centers with dedicated support to help bridge the gap between HPC facilities and E4S product application developers. NERSC has deployed several versions of E4S on Perlmutter and Cori using the Spack package manager. We intend to use E4S as the vehicle for installing and supporting much of the software we provide for users going forward.

Session Details

Richard Gerber, NERSC's HPC Department Head, will start with opening remarks and present what E4S is for NERSC users. Mike Heroux, who leads the ECP Software Technology (ST) group, will present an overview of the group and what types of applications are being developed in the ECP project. E4S consists of many open source products developed by ECP ST teams which are installed on DOE systems at OLCF, ALCF and NERSC. Sameer Shende, who leads the E4S project, will present the components of E4S and the different modes of accessing the E4S stack.

Katie Antypas leads the Hardware Integration (HI) group, whose focus is application integration at facilities, and hardware evaluation, training and productivity, and software deployment at facilities. Katie will present an update on current activities and roadmap for the upcoming year.

We will discuss the E4S software deployment process at HPC centers, with a particular focus on what we're doing here at NERSC to bring you reliable, performant HPC software. Erik Palmer will present an overview of NERSC E4S Documentation documentation.  Participants are encouraged to follow the hands-on session if you have access to NERSC systems. Shahzeb will present the Spack Infrastructure project at NERSC that discusses how we leverage GitLab to automate Spack deployments using our Continuous Integration capabilities.

The Software Deployment (SD) group is responsible for deploying ECP software at the DOE facilities via E4S. The SD group partners with Application Development (AD) and ST projects to properly tune their software to run efficiently on the facility system. This group is responsible for providing CI infrastructure to help AD/ST teams automate their workflows using GitLab CI. Ryan Adamson will provide an overview of the Software Deployment group including current challenges and the future roadmap.

The event concludes with a hands-on exercise on using Spack on Perlmutter to deploy a software stack. Sameer Shende will present how to use E4S containers, replacing MPI in an E4S container with the host MPI, creating custom containers for your application, using E4S on AWS and DOE facilities, and building applications using E4S with a bare-metal installation. He will highlight the use of E4S on Perlmutter and answer questions about applying E4S to your projects.

Please refer to the corresponding ECP training page for more details and presenter bios.

Venue

This event will be presented both online and in-person at NERSC/LBNL (visitor info) in Berkeley, CA. The training will be held at Building 59 (Wang Hall), Room 3101, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific Time. Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees.

Remote attendance is possible for this event. A link to connection information will be sent to registered attendees.

Registration

Please use this form to register. There is no registration fee.

Material

• E4S-2022-08-25-Adamson-1.pdf
• E4S-2022-08-25-Antypas.pdf
• E4S-2022-08-25-Heroux.pdf
• E4S-2022-08-25-Shende-1.pdf
• E4S-2022-08-25-Shende-2.pdf
• Recording