use dedicated GCP runners

[proppy]

We should consider using https://antmicro.com/blog/2021/08/open-source-github-actions-runners-with-gcp-and-terraform/ to get quicker feedback on the CI jobs.

[kgugala]

this is, of course, doable. We'd just need to setup the runners in a GCP project. Do we have a project dedicated to HDL GH org?

[proppy]

yes! https://console.cloud.google.com/?project=github-hdl

[umarcor]

Actually, we do want to use "self-hosted" runners in multiple repos of this org (incl. containers, conda-* and maybe packages). See hdl/containers#51.

There is an 'hdl-containers' project in GCP, which is used for the container registry (gcr.io/hdl-containers). I do have management access there, using my personal gmail account. That allows me to e.g. update the tokens, which expire every 1-3 months. See https://hdl.github.io/containers/dev/Tasks.html#credentials.

However, I'm unsure about 'hdl-containers' and 'github-hdl' being the same project in GCP. Precisely, I don't have permissions to access https://console.cloud.google.com/?project=github-hdl. I'm missing resourcemanager.projects.get.

In the end of September 2021, I talked to @mithro and @QuantamHD about this (through e-mail). Ethan told it was problematic to add either my university account or my personal gmail account for these purposes. Since I do have an antmicro account now, maybe we can reconsider.

[mithro]

Looks like both the hdl-conda and github-hdl Google Cloud Platform projects were set up in the past to host resources for this organization.

I believe the plan was that github-hdl organization would not be allowed to have publically accessible resources (like Google Cloud Storage buckets), while hdl-conda (and hdl-containers) would be were results would be published and thus be significantly more constrained.

I thus think it makes the most sense to deploy the GitHub runners under github-hdl for this organization. I'll make sure that @umarcor and @kgugala have access to the organization through their Antmicro accounts.

[mithro]

@umarcor / @kgugala - Should have pending invites to manage the github-hdl organization.

[proppy]

@PiotrZierhoffer @ajelinski @kgugala how can I help to setup dedicated runner for conda-eda? per #210 (comment) this will become necessary for bigger packages like Xyce.

[kgugala]

@proppy We can setup the infrastructure. Do you know what machines will be needed?

[proppy]

There are currently 64 package building jobs being run concurrently on every commit.

The longest job (XLS) takes around 2 hours and dominate the total build time.

Assuming you can't have multiple runner running on a single node what about starting with 4x n2-standard-32?

[kgugala]

We can choose machine type per job in CI (you can configure this in the yaml file). We just need to have a list of machine types we want to use

[proppy]

you can configure this in the yaml file

per job or per workflow?

[mithro]

per job I think?

[proppy]

We just need to have a list of machine types we want to use

• n2-standard-2 # same as github workers
• n2-standard-32 # for larger build (xls, xyce)