Conference call notes 20211110 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 185th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday Nov 10th 2021 (16:00 UTC)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (11):

  • Sebastian Achilles (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany)
  • Fotis Georgatos (EPFL, Switzerland)
  • Terje Kvernes (University of Oslo, Norway)
  • Kurt Lust (Univ. of Antwerp, Belgium + LUMI User Support Team)
  • Alan O'Cais (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany)
  • Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
  • Bart Oldeman (Compute Canada)
  • Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)
  • Jörg Saßmannshausen (NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, UK)
  • Alexandre Strube (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany)
  • Davide Vanzo (Microsoft HPC)

Agenda

  • overview of recent developments
  • Q&A

Recent developments

  • release timeline
    • latest release: EasyBuild v4.5.0 (Oct 29th 2021)
    • ETA next release: end of Nov'21?
  • recent changes
    • framework
    • easyblocks
      • bug fixes
        • make sure custom easyblock for installing EasyBuild respects requested version of Python (like $EB_PYTHON) (PR #2581)
        • use correct include directory for FlexiBLAS (PR #2610)
      • enhancements
        • add support for installing R extensions in parallel (PR #2408)
        • enhance PETSc easyblock to run tests in parallel (PR #2601)
        • detect problem with compiling CPU detection code in configure output in GROMACS easyblock (PR #2609)
        • add custom custom easyconfig parameter 'backends' in FlexiBLAS easyblock to specify backends (PR #2605)
      • 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
          • also fixes other problem with TensorFlow tf.matmul that ends up using CPU backend for 32bit floats (issue #14120)
    • easyconfigs
      • ~100 easyconfig PRs merged since last conf call
      • bug fixes
        • add patch for GROMACS 2019.3 easyconfigs using CMake 3.15.3 to fix CPU detection (PR #14212)
      • (noteworthy) new software
      • noteworthy software updates
      • changes
        • promote foss/2021.07 to foss/2021b and update FFTW to 3.3.10 (PR #14217)
        • promote intel/2021.09 to intel/2021b (PR #14218)
        • rename R bindings for Arrow to arrow-R, so it can be used in a lowercase module naming scheme (PR #)
        • add BLIS and imkl (x86_64 only) builddependencies to FlexiBLAS 0.3.4 with GCC/11.2.0 toolchain (PR #14225)
        • add missing dependencies for recent LibTIFF versions: XZ, jbigkit, zstd (PR #14079)
          • this seems to have caused some fallout, see issue #14219
          • ideas/suggestions to fix that regression are welcome in the issue!
  • to merge/fix/tackle soon
    • framework
      • reported bugs / bug fixes
        • only remove lock if it was created in the same EasyBuild session (not if it existed already) (PR #3889)
        • TODO: fully fix regression w.r.t. using remote Git repository as easyconfigs archive (issue #3892)
        • builddir not set correctly when build_in_installdir = True and running --sanity-check-only (issue #3895)
      • enhancements
        • determine which extensions can be skipped in parallel (if --parallel-extensions-install is enabled) (PR #3890)
    • easyblocks
      • changes
        • allow oversubscription of MPI ranks w.r.t. available cores in sanity check
          • see also issue #13945: OpenMPI does not build on machine with six cores
          • allow oversubscription in OpenMPI MPI execution check (PR #2611)
            • see also PR #2570: prevent OpenMPI from failing on machines with less than 8 cores
          • skip motorBike tutorial case in OpenFOAM sanity check if available cores < 6 (PR #2615)
          • it would be better to have a central fix for this in framework, or at least something that can be leveraged easily from easyblocks/easyconfigs?
            • self.toolchain.allow_mpi_oversubscription() to call in sanity_check_step of specific easyblocks?
            • support for using sanity_check_allow_mpi_oversubscription = True in easyconfigs?
            • build option, configuration parameter?
    • easyconfigs

Q&A

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