Conference call notes 20180620

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Notes on the 104th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday June 20th 2018 (5pm - 6pm CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (5):

• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
• Victor Holanda (CSCS, Switzerland)
• Davide Vanzo (Vanderbilt University, US)
• Fotis Georgatos (SDSC, Switzerland)

Agenda

• report on testing of proposed 2018b common toolchains
• outlook to next EasyBuild release (3.6.2)
• Q&A

Outlook to next EasyBuild release (3.6.2)

• framework: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/milestone/57
• easyblocks: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/milestone/49
• easyconfigs: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/milestone/52
• patch for Python 3 to fix segfault issue when building wiht Intel compilers
  • cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6447/files#diff-bdbfca2206414b3b37794b77c0abb8e8
  • problem is it uses -O0 for sha3, so we don't want to apply it always?
  • unclear why not everyone is seeing this problem...
  • does ulimit -s unlimited help to dance around the issue?

Report on testing of proposed 2018b common toolchains

• foss/2018b proposal: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6424
• intel/2018b proposal: https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6409
• resolved problems:
  • segfault in hwloc, cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6461
    • fixed by disabling -ftree-vectorize for hwloc
  • patch for bug in binutils 2.30, cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6463
    • ran into this when building PLUMED with intel/2018b, which uses an obscure linker option
• rebuild of all 2018a easyconfigs (without version updates):
  • 140 installed modules for intel/2018b
  • 136 modules for foss/2018b
  • 94 modules for GCCcore/7.3.0
  • only ran into issues with hwloc (when building FFTW on Skylake) and PLUMED, see above
  • everything else built fine without issues...
• proposed 2018b common toolchain updates can be considered good to lock down?
  • what about OpenBLAS 0.3.1? cfr. https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/issues/1576
  • we can include that if it's released in time (i.e. in the next week or so)
• PRs have been opened for updated versions of:
  • X11 (20180604)
  • Perl (5.26.2)
  • Python (2.7.15 & 3.7.0 (WIP rc1))
  • Mesa (18.1.1)
  • coming up: R (3.5.0)
  • cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/labels/2018b

Q&A

• Victor: make GROMACS aware of optarch=GENERIC?
  • cfr. https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyblocks/blob/3c92355e1f3d9a4f83bd0d1951bf0e608d51f384/easybuild/easyblocks/f/fftw.py#L106 for example on how to do that
• next conf call: Wed July 11th 2018
  • see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild/wiki/Conference-calls#future-easybuild-conference-calls
  • shifted with one week to avoid conflict with GROMACS conf call