Build failing due to lack of resources - other options?

[Abby-Wheelis]

As established when I am trying to work on #101, my work laptop and my personal laptop both don't have enough resources to carry out the build process. @shankari had this same issue see comment, but has a more powerful laptop than I do.

I have a stronger laptop on the way, but in the meantime, are there any other options? If we can establish other pathways, it might make it easier for others with this problem to still work on EVerest.

[Abby-Wheelis]

The first thing that comes to mind would be using hpc, since that is a resource available to us at NREL to help with computationally intensive tasks. What would we need to do in order to allow hpc to do the heavy lifting, and not rely on a local machine with enough resources?

Docker:

• our current workflow is all inside of docker containers
• NREL hpc does not support Docker, citing Docker's need for root-level permissions
• They provide Apptainer as an alternative that is supported
• The recommended workflow is to build a Docker image locally, then convert to Apptainer for use on hpc
• It looks like images can be pulled directly onto hpc from dockerhub, or export from your local computer as a tar file and upload to hpc, then convert to Apptainer

While we can't directly use Docker on hpc, it seems there are established workflows we could start with.

[Abby-Wheelis]

My first interpretation of this would mean that we would have to build all of the docker containers locally, zip them up, then we could run them on the hpc. I think this would work for development, allowing me to recompile everything in the container and not run out of resources, but it might be tedious and hard to replicate. The two examples in the docs that I've seen involve a single dockerfile, and our configuration is much more complex.