I’m curious if https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/announcements/end-of-service-announcement-for-virtual-servers-for-vpc-on-power will mean an end to the ppc64le in Travis CI.
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There is no direct impact to the availability of the Travis CI service. We are moving to a different set of ppc64le servers in the Cloud and working with Travis to make that move as transparent as possible. We may have some short term additional ppc64le job queues as we validate the move, but any workloads set to build on ppc64le should continue without impact. That said, if there are any impacts, I expect we’ll communicate directly with any impacted projects.
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Piggybacking onto this topic - is there any chance of seeing POWER9 ppc64le in the near future with the “different set of ppc64le servers in the Cloud” ? (Asking for OpenBLAS)
Thx,
Martin
Hey Martin, we just completed the move of the back end of travis-ci to our PowerVS Cloud (part of the IBM Cloud). All Power servers there are Power9. Also, some of the servers at OSL are Power9 servers (some are still Power8) but you should have access there for OpenBLAS as well.
Great news, thanks. Some IBM folks suggested I should apply for POWERCI access at OSUOSL directly, but the plain Jenkins interface there is quite… daunting compared to the ease of setup you guys 'n gals provide.
Hey Martin, thanks for the kudos on Travis - I do like its interface and capabilities on Power. However, I did send you a name in another thread from my team that can probably help if you want to use Jenkins. I’m probably a bigger fan of Travis if that works for you, but whatever CI gets the job done is the right CI!
gerrit
One more thing unfortunately - is it possible that the Travis jobs get scheduled onto either P8 and P9 (or even still P8 only), and if so is there any chance to influence this in the yml file ? Thought I had a P9 system yesterday, then spent some time getting a newer gcc installed, now build host is always autodetected as P8 and refuses to execute P9 code.
That’s a tough question. Everything now scheduled from Travis-ci.com and staging.travis-ci.com goes to Power9.
OSL has some Power8 and Power9 servers, and are requested only when you request a VM build. So if you request a VM you have a chance of getting a Power8 VM. I don’t think we have set up separate queues at OSL for Power8 vs Power9, and we will never have hardware older that Power9 in the IBM Cloud (which backs travis-ci.com).
Do you have a specific need for Power8 at this point? Is it mostly for regression testing? I can see why OpenBLAS may have some configuration options or - hopefully - run time detection options to operate on Power8.
I can see what we can do with our OSL and Travis friends if so. The request makes sense for a small number of projects that are more tightly tied to the chip architecture.
gerrit
Thanks, that would explain it as the current configuration requests a VM (purely for historic reasons I suspect). I’ll try to change it to a container-based one (which will probably fix the compiler version problem more elegantly as well). The specific need is mainly for Power9 at this point, with Power8 for regression testing. OpenBLAS has both
compile-time and run time detection. BTW I see that Jenkins now lets me configure projects so I’ll split my brain some more.