Title: Managing the User Environment: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract:

This BoF is about managing complexity of the software stack using
modules.  It is for admin and other support staff who are in the
trenches including those who manage campus and department
resources. It is especially for those who might be outgrowing their
current approach.  Please bring your lessons learned, questions, war
stories and favorite tricks.  This will be a place where we will
discuss our progress and best practices, articulate additional needs
and perhaps identify new opportunities.

Description:

We expect to begin our discussion with an informal assessment of our
experience with environmental modules.  How are we doing? What can we
do better? This brief introduction will then open up to discuss such
as how a site can organize their software stack, write robust module files
handle shared home file systems, test packages before release,
deprecate packages. 

A well-managed user environment is particularly important for
researchers transitioning to high-end computation. Such users face
formidable barriers to entry, including difficulties managing their
personal environment, diagnosing associated problems, and learning how
to recover from them. One important goal of this BoF is to do our part
to break down those barriers. How do we protect new users, however,
without hindering those with more experience? We hope to touch on this
question as well. More generally, we expect this work to benefit all
users: improving workflows, reducing error rates, and increasing
repeatability.


The proposer bring to the table passion for and experience improving
the end-user experience. Dr. McLay is the author and maintainer of Lmod, a
module system that ensures each user's environment includes software
and libraries that are consistent with and appropriate for the current
compiler and Message Passing Interface (MPI) communications library.
