Conference call notes 20210929

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

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (XXX):

• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)

• Fotis Georgatos (SDSC, Switzerland)

• Jasper Grimm (University of York, UK)

• Alexander Grund (TU Dresden, Germany

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

• Daniel Lopez (CESGA, Spain)

• Kurt Lust (Univ. of Antwerp, Belgium + LUMI User Support Team)

• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

• Jörg Saßmannshausen (NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, UK)

• Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)

Agenda

• overview of recent developments
• Q&A

Recent developments

• release timeline
  • latest release: EasyBuild v4.4.2 (Sept 7th 2021)
  • next release
    • EasyBuild v4.5.0 (some significant enhancements already in the pipeline)
    • ETA: mid Oct'21 (?)
    • project with target issues/PRs for this release: https://github.com/orgs/easybuilders/projects/14
• recent changes
  • framework
    • bug fixes
      • ...
    • enhancements
      • ...
    • changes
      • change copy_file function to raise an error when trying to copy non-existing file (PR #3836)
  • easyblocks
    • bug fixes
      • ...
    • enhancements
      • ...
    • new easyblocks
      • (none)
    • changes
      • (none)
  • easyconfigs
    • ~75 easyconfig PRs merged since last conf call
    • bug fixes
      • ...
    • enhancements
      • (nothing major)
    • new software
      • ...
    • noteworthy software updates
      • ...
    • changes
      • ...
• to merge/fix/tackle soon
  • framework
    • reported bugs / bug fixes
      • add optimal optimization flags for Intel compilers on AMD CPUs (issue #3793)
        • -xHost results in only using SSE2 on AMD systems...
        • see also (PR #3797
    • enhancements
      • avoid using a priority in prepend_module_path (Lmod) to avoid costly module calls (PR #3636)
      • add support for installing extensions in parallel (WIP) (PR #3667)
        • needs more test + a dedicated unit test
        • should be marked experimental at first?
      • finding modules with multiple modulepaths and HMNS (issue #3703)
      • filter out duplicate paths added to module files (PR #3770)
    • changes
      • fully drop support code for Python < 2.7 (PR #3788)
      • test suite improvements (PR #3790)
  • easyblocks
    • reported bugs / bug fixes
      • Prevent OpenMPI from failing on machines with less than 8 cores (PR #2570)
        • caused by sanity check that was added to OpenMPI easyblock recently (see PR #2444)
    • enhancements
      • add support for installing R extensions in parallel (WIP) (PR #2408)
      • enhance GCC easyblock to add support for AMD GPU offloading (PR #2578)
      • reduce the number of command line args for CMake configure (PR #2514)
      • enhance TensorFlow easyblock to take into account provided OpenSSL dependency (PR #2575)
      • enable MKL-DNN/oneDNN usage for aarch64 CPUs in TensorFlow 2.5+ (PR #2574)
    • changes
      • (nothing major?)
    • new software
      • (nothing major?)
  • easyconfigs
    • bug reports & fixes
      • remove superflous -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE (PR #13384)
      • Add OpenSSL dependency to Kent_tools 418 easyconfig to fix a link error (PR #13989)
    • enhancements
      • (nothing major?)
    • new software
      • see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/labels/new
    • noteworthy software updates
      • SciPy-bundle with intel/2021a (PR #12964)
        • need to look into handful of failing tests...

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

• ...