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Conference call notes 20210929

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Kenneth Hoste edited this page Oct 13, 2021 · 7 revisions

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Notes on the 182nd EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Sept 29th 2021 (08:00 UTC)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (8):

  • Sebastian Achilles (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany)
  • Simon Branford (Univ. of Birmingham, UK)
  • Alex Domingo (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Jörg Saßmannshausen (NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, UK)
  • Kurt Lust (Univ. of Antwerp, Belgium + LUMI User Support Team)
  • Alan O'Cais (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany)
  • Miguel Dias Costa (Univ. of Singapore)

Agenda

  • overview of recent developments
  • Q&A

Recent developments

  • release timeline
    • latest release: EasyBuild v4.4.2 (Sept 7th 2021)
    • next release
  • recent changes
    • framework
      • bug fixes
        • disable progress bars when running the tests to avoid messing up test suite output (PR #3835)
        • fix broken test by taking into account changed error raised by Python 3.9.7 when copying directory via shutil.copyfile (PR #3840)
        • ensure newer location of CUDA stubs is taken into account by RPATH filter (PR #3850)
      • enhancements
        • ...
      • changes
        • change copy_file function to raise an error when trying to copy non-existing file (PR #3836)
    • easyblocks
      • bug fixes
        • (none)
      • enhancements
        • add support for specifying subdirectory for target installation directory in CMakeMake (PR #2579)
      • new easyblocks
        • (none)
      • changes
        • (none)
    • easyconfigs
      • ~75 easyconfig PRs merged since last conf call
      • bug fixes
        • correctly specify install prefix for CUDA in OSU-Micro-Benchmarks after renaming CUDAcore to CUDA for 2021a (PR #14063)
        • add patch to fix failing file system cache test for jax 0.2.19 on recent Linux kernels (PR #14067, PR #14070)
        • remove h5py 3.x dependency for Keras with 2020b toolchain, since TensorFlow provides (and requires) h5py 2.x (PR #14052)
        • add patch for BLIS 0.8.1 to fix dgemm FPE signalling on Broadwell (PR #14018)
      • enhancements
        • ...
      • new software
        • ...
      • noteworthy software updates
      • changes
        • ...
  • to merge/fix/tackle soon
    • framework
      • reported bugs / bug fixes
        • In several of the compiler toolchains, some of the toolchainopts seem to have no effect (issue #3838)
          • should add a check to framework test suite to avoid that this can happen
          • examples: lto/loop for GCC toolchain
        • Sources for extensions are still downloaded with --module-only (issue #3849)
      • enhancements
        • also dump environment to reprod directory (PR #3374)
        • use separate different progress bars for different aspects of the installations being performed (WIP) (PR #3844)
        • Add option to make sanity_check_paths arch dependent (PR #3845)
        • add support for collecting GPU info (via nvidia-smi), and include it in --show-system-info and test report (PR #3851)
      • changes
        • Deprecate use of ec['parallel'] and fix updating the template value (PR #3842)
    • easyblocks
      • reported bugs / bug fixes
        • Make sure EasyBuild easyblock respects requested version of Python (PR #2581)
        • restore RPATH wrappers for OpenMPI sanity check (WIP) (PR #2582)
        • fix installation of libcp2k for recent CP2K versions (PR #2585)
        • update CP2K easyblock to use -D__MKL (PR #2586)
      • enhancements
        • enhance GCC easyblock to add support for AMD GPU offloading (PR #2578)
        • enhance TensorFlow easyblock to take into account provided OpenSSL dependency (PR #2575)
        • enhance Rpm generic easyblock to support installing tarball of RPMs (by unpacking it first) + take into account (pre)installopts (PR #2580)
        • enhance COMSOL easyblock to change permission on build directory during extract step (to allow using patches) (PR #2584)
      • changes
        • don't use --config=mkl for TensorFlow 2.4+ (PR #2583)
          • cfr. reported performance problems for CPU-only TensorFlow installations (issue #2577), which can worked around via export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
      • new software
        • (nothing major?)
    • easyconfigs

Common toolchains

2021b (WIP!)

  • for now: foss/2021.07 and intel/2021.07 (candidates for 2021b after testing confirms they work well)
    • foss/2021.07: included with EasyBuild v4.4.2 release
    • intel/2021.07: WIP at PR #13639
  • support for GCC 11.2 is expected in upcoming intel-compilers 2021.4 release...
  • toolchain working group to follow up on this

Q&A

  • Jörg: what can we, should we do when software which is needed does not compile on PPC and/or ARM
  • Alan/Bart: hide away from users build dependencies used for bootstrapping a toolchain
    • install these in a separate install directory (only just keep modules separate in modules/bootstrap?)
    • also relevant for Perl minimal installation
    • extra option in easyconfig for this (bootstrap_only = True)?
    • mark stuff to be only used for bootstrap, which should imply they can only ever be used as build dependency (or as a full dep of another bootstrap easyconfig)
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