RADIUSS Shared CI

Here, we give an overview of the RADIUSS Shared CI project, which contains CI infrastructure developed for RADIUSS projects. RADIUSS Shared CI is a sub-project of the LLNL RADIUSS project focusing on sharing resource and documentation for Continuous Integration (CI) among RADIUSS projects.

Note

LLNL’s RADIUSS project (Rapid Application Development via an Institutional Universal Software Stack) aims to broaden usage across LLNL and the open source community of a set of libraries and tools used for HPC scientific application development.

For more detailed information, please see the following documentation.

RADIUSS Shared CI User Documentation

• RADIUSS Shared CI User Guide

RADIUSS Shared CI Developer Documentation

• RADIUSS Shared CI Developer Guide

Background and Motivation

Projects in the RADIUSS effort target the same machines and use the Spack packaging system to ensure that they build successfully with similar toolchains.

We designed an automated CI infrastructure based on GitLab that we meant to sufficiently flexible to be shared among RADIUSS projects. The infrastructure involves using Spack to setup the project dependencies and generate build configuration files. This allows projects to easily share the full context of their builds. The project is then built and tested as usual and most of the CI infrastructure is shared to avoid duplication and reduce maintenance cost.

Cool features provided by RADIUSS Shared CI

• A shared configuration, for reduced maintenance.

• A core set of specs to build coherently with other projects.

• Ability to add extra specs.

• Uses GitLab child pipelines to keep the pipeline readable.

• Each child pipeline reports independently to GitHub.

• Project can extend their pipeline at will.

Overview

We organize the documentation around the three steps necessary to adopt the RADIUSS Shared CI methodology. These steps are documented in the RADIUSS Shared CI User Guide.

1. Use Spack to install dependencies and configure the project build. Spack provides a single context to express toolchains, machine setup, and build sequence. Spack is increasingly used to install the dependency tree of large simulation codes.

2. Build and test without breaking your habits. We do not require the adoption of Spack to build your code but we require that your build system accepts the configuration file generated by Spack as an input (CMakeCache.txt for a CMake build system). That way, dependencies and options are set coherently with the spec provided to build the dependency tree.

3. Setup the CI using the shared template. Once you have put in the effort to implement the first two steps, you should be able to benefit from the shared CI infrastructure. In a very complex scenario, you would still be able to use the RADIUSS Shared CI template as a starting point for a custom implementation.

In the RADIUSS Shared CI Developer Guide, we discuss the layout of the RADIUSS Shared CI infrastructure and how the different pieces work together. Technical choices are also explained there.