Conference call notes 20201014

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Notes on the 158th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday October 14th 2020 (15:00 UTC - 17:00 CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (XXX):

• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)

• Alex Domingo (VUB, Belgium)

• Simon Branford (Univ. of Birmingham, UK)

• Alan O'Cais (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany)

• Jörg Saßmannshausen (NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, UK)

• Terje Kvernes (University of Oslo, Norway)

• Lars Viklund (Umeå University, Sweden)

• Victor Holanda Rusu (CSCS, Switzerland)

• Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, Oxford, UK)

Agenda

• recent developments
  • incl. fosscuda/2020a
• updates on 2020b version of common toolchains (foss, intel)
• support for "spec" file to specify software stacks to install with EasyBuild
• Q&A

Recent developments

• ETA next release (probably EasyBuild v4.3.1): next week?
  • project: https://github.com/orgs/easybuilders/projects/9
• recent changes
  • framework
    • (PR #)
  • easyblocks
    • (PR #)
    • (PR #)
    • (PR #)
    • (PR #)
  • easyconfigs
    • (PR #)
    • (PR #)
    • (PR #)
    • (PR #)
• to merge soon:
  • framework (https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/milestone/80)
    • enhance apply_regex_substitutions to allow specifying action to take in case there are no matches (PR #3440)
    • Check for _VERSION and _PREFIX Cray variables with software and module name (PR #3460)
  • easyblocks *
  • easyconfigs *

Updates on fosscuda/2020a

• merged, see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/11424
• foss/2020a + CUDA 11.0.2 (with OpenMPI on top of it)
  • CUDA 11.1 => fosscuda/2020b

2020b update of common toolchains

• base: GCC 10.2 + binutils 2.35
• foss:
  • OpenMPI 4.0.5 + UCX 1.9.0
    • not waiting for OpenMPI v4.1.0, still WIP (see https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/milestone/59) (RC is available, final release soon) + UCX 1.9.0 (rc6 is out now)
  • OpenBLAS 0.3.10 (updated from 0.3.9 in 2020a)
    • maybe 0.3.11? see https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/milestone/30
  • FFTW 3.3.8 (no updates)
  • WIP PR #11489
    • compilation failures with ScaLAPACK 2.1.0 with GCC 10.2, need to switch to CMake-based installation procedure?
      • see upstream fix
• intel:
  • see PR #11337
    • WIP, problems with impi + UCX (only on CentOS8?)
      • see https://github.com/openucx/ucx/issues/4742?
    • Alex has tested this extensively, works very well, resolves all earlier issues with impi
  • compilers: 2020 update 3 (Aug 21st 2020)
  • MPI: 2019 update 8 (Jul 15th 2020)
  • MKL: 2020 update 3 (Sept 1st 2020)
  • is GCC 10.x supported officially as base compiler?

    • reply from Kenneth's inside Intel contact:

      GCC 10.2:
      Since gcc 10.2 released on July 23, no past releases of 19.1 (like PSXE 2020 update 2) have been tested with it. Upcoming PSXE 2020 update 4 (compiler 19.1.3) is tested with gcc 10.2.  For 2021.1 Beta 09 was tested with gcc 10.2.
      We haven't seen major issues for gcc 10.2 vs 10.1 so it would be safe to assume that PSXE 2020 update 2 will work (it was tested against gcc 10.1).
      

      binutils 2.35:
      We haven’t tested any IL0 compiler against binutils 2.35 (released on July 24). We only do testing with binutils that come with OS we      support. The most recent binutils we tested are 2.34 coming with Ubuntu 20.04.
      So we cannot claim the compiler will work fine with binutils 2.35.
      

• recent progress:
  • merged PRs with GCCcore/10.2.0:
    • Perl 5.32.0 (PR #11201)
    • OpenMPI 4.0.5 (PR #11333)
    • bzip2, fontconfig, freetype, GMP, gperf, intltool, libffi, libpng, SQLite, Tcl, util-linux
  • open PRs with GCCcore/10.2.0:
    • CMake v3.18.4 (PR #11492)
    • Python 2.7.18 + 3.8.4 (PR #11490)
• notes:
  • planning to drop versionsuffix when using Python 3 as a dep (retain with Python 2)
• TODO:
  • testing large applications on top of these candidate toolchain definitions! (R, OpenFOAM, GROMACS, ...)

Support for "spec" file to specify software stacks to install with EasyBuild

• https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/issues/3468

Ideas for next EasyBuild User Meeting

• see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild/wiki/6th-EasyBuild-User-Meeting

Q&A

• (none)