Improving the new user experience
Summary
We would like to improve the experience of new users of the Einstein Toolkit. Some of us will work on this at the North American Einstein Toolkit workshop in August 2017.
If you have suggestions for improvements, or things which don't work well right now, please add them below.
We probably won't have time during the 2-day workshop to address all that is listed here, but we will make an effort to make progress on one or two items.
Brainstorming
Obstacles faced by new users
- The ET takes a long time to compile
- Maybe have multiple thornlists
- The ET has a lot of dependencies, or compiles a lot of libraries (which sometimes don't compile successfully)
- Is the self-built version of OpenMPI ever actually usable?
- Erik has talked about using Spack for libraries. Maybe we should push for this.
- Many of the examples do not work
- At a previous workshop, this was evaluated, but there was no resolution (Fixing examples)
- There are too many tutorials
- The following are listed on the wiki:
- The names of the tutorials do not allow users to distinguish what they are for. For example, the Tutorial for New Users and Simplified Tutorial for New Users differ in that the former is run on Queen Bee, and the latter is run on a user's own laptop or workstation.
- Perhaps all the above should be consolidated
- Configuring the ET on a new machine is very difficult (even just compiling, let along interactions with queuing systems etc)
- It's particularly frustrating to me that simfactory cannot figure out even simple things about a new machine (e.g. ppn), and if you don't get this right you aren't allowed to run multi-threaded jobs, etc.
- On slower laptops, the build stage regularly hangs and has to be killed and restarted (which almost always solves the problem). Can we figure out which components are responsible, and omit them from quick-start tutorials?
- RH: if the slower laptop also has less memory (or is a VM) then I would first try and monitor how much memory in particular the linker consumes. Testing this on my workstation it uses 1-2GB of RAM for a full ET build. On a 32bit VM with a cut down thornlist (no Formaline) it uses ~700MB. Similarly some C++ code takes a hug e amount of memory to compile.
