ExCL March Meeting 2026

March 2026 ExCL meeting slides.

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Below is a LLM-generated summary from the meeting slides.

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🚀 ExCL Monthly Update — March 2026

This month’s updates focus on storage usability, CI improvements, shared infrastructure, and data management best practices.

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📂 Improved Project Storage Navigation

We’ve made a small but impactful usability improvement:

• You can now read project folder names under /auto/projects
• Permissions remain unchanged, but directory discovery is much easier
• Tools like vim, yazi, and tab completion now work more effectively

💡 Note: The first access still triggers automount—after that, navigation is seamless.

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📦 New Shared Storage for Apptainer Images

To better support large container workflows:

• New shared location:

  /auto/projects/apptainer
  

• Designed for large, reusable Apptainer images
• Current use cases include:
  • Unreal Engine containers
  • AMD Vitis environments
• Storage policy:
  • Default cap: 1 TB
  • Adjustable as needed

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⚙️ CI on ExCL: Slurm + GitLab (Recommended)

Running CI through Slurm is now the standard and recommended approach for jobs running across multiple ExCL systems.

Key Improvements

• ✅ CI template now checks sbatch return codes
• ⚠️ Standard error is treated as a warning, not immediate failure
• 🧪 New system-device-smoke-test:
  • Validates CUDA, HIP, OpenMP, OpenCL
  • Runs across major ExCL systems
  • Uses shared IRIS setup scripts:

source /auto/software/iris/setup-system.source

📌 This significantly improves reliability and portability of CI pipelines across heterogeneous nodes.

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📊 DVC for Data Management on ExCL

We now recommend DVC (Data Version Control) for managing datasets and pipelines.

Why DVC Works Well on ExCL

• Shared cache model:
  • Store data in a project-level shared cache
  • Avoid duplication across repos
• Hybrid workflow:
  • Same cache can act as:
    • Local shared storage (on ExCL)
    • Remote storage (outside ExCL)

👉 See the DVC Quick Start Guide in ExCL Docs for setup instructions.

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📚 Documentation Best Practices Highlight

We highlighted an excellent resource:

“Minimum Viable Documentation Product (MVDP)” from the Consortium for the Advancement of Scientific Software

Key Takeaway

Follow a documentation checklist:

• 🗺️ Synopsis: 1–3 sentence summary of your project
• 📑 Tutorial: ✨ Show people what your software can do! ✨
• 👩‍🔧 Contact Information: How to ask a human about your software
• 🚀 Install Instructions: How to install your software
• 📜 Citation Instructions: How to cite your software
• 🙌 Contribution Statement: How users can contribute to your project
• 📚 Reference Material: Precise specifications of APIs, etc.
• ⚖️ Licensing Statement: The legal status of your code
• 🙏 Acknowledgments: Credit your funders

🔗 Resource: https://onegoodtutorial.org

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🖥️ System & Infrastructure Updates

• ⏳ Migration of MI100 / V100 system delayed until after SC26 submissions
• 🔄 Work ongoing to restore Groq inference hardware
• 🆕 Tenstorrent Blackhole acquisition in progress
• 🔧 Scheduled downtime:
  • Tuesday, March 24, 9–11 AM
    • OS updates + system reboots
    • No NVIDIA driver updates (unless requested)

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💬 Open Topics & Discussion Areas

We’re actively gathering feedback on:

• Legacy system usage (e.g., Leconte PowerPC + V100)
• Hudson access policies. Request to limit system to Slurm-only access.
• Cloud GPU access options

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📌 Summary

This month’s updates continue to push ExCL toward:

• More usable shared infrastructure
• Scalable data workflows (DVC)
• Robust CI across heterogeneous systems
• Better documentation practices

If you have feedback or want help adopting any of these tools, reach out!