The new build system and NMI

I have discussed it with Timothy, and we are in agreement that now would be a good time to explore adding NMI-support to the new build system.

Briefly, here is the the tentative vision. For each master module (including vanilla-trunk) there should be the possibility of uploading the appropriate modules to NMI and running a test suite that is appropriate for that particular configuration of modules.

I think there are several issues that need to be addressed. First and most basically, what is the best way to get the modules onto NMI machines? Second, how will the appropriate modules be selected for transport? Clearly, whatever approach is used, this will have to make use of the module-locations.txt file associated with a particular distribution. Third, how will one designate that they want to receive reports for the NMI build of a particular master module? Clearly, not everyone is going to be interested in the NMI reports for all the master modules that are tested, but they may be interested in a subset. For example, someone working in phylogenetics might be interested in the NMI reports associated with the ppod master module, but they are not necessarily going to be interested in the results of a master module that is being developed by a graduate student whose research they are not familiar with and who they do not know. Fourth, not everyone will be interested in NMI reports for the master module they are working on. How shall we designate that some master modules will be involved but others will not? Fifth, it will be appropriate to run only a subset of the various tests suites that have been developed for a particular master module, but it is also possible that different master modules will want to share some test suites that exercise common functionality. How shall the test suites that should be used for a particular master module be specified? How should sharing of test suites between master modules work?

If anyone has any thoughts on these questions, I would love to hear them. Basically, this is the subject that I am exploring right now. I hope to have something implemented soon.

David,

I saw your IRC note asking where documentation on NMI is. There is extensive NMI documentation at http://nmi.cs.wisc.edu.  Our current Kepler NMI build is located in the kepler/trunk/build-nmi subdirectory, and mostly consists of the needed configuration files.  NMI is simple on the surface, but in the process of developing our build I had to work around a lot of NMI bugs (and we're still experiencing some). So I would highly recommend that you work with Chad and me to implement this, rather than doing it independently.  Chad has been working with NMI for the last several months trying to work out the subtle problems with the current build, and I think he would be well-suited to help transition the proposed extension build to use this system as well.  Chad has the user info to log into NMI for Kepler as well.

Sounds great. I will definitely be in contact with Chad on these issues soon.