Conference call notes 20250702 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 273th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday 2 July 2025 (15:00 UTC / 17:00 CEST)

Attendees

List of attendees (17):

Simon Branford (Univ. of Birmingham, UK)
Alex Domingo (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Loris Ercole (CECAM)
Davide Grassano (CECAM)
Jasper Grimm (University of York, UK)
Alexander Grund (ZIH, Dresden, Germany)
Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
Adam Huffman (University of Oxford, UK)
Kurt Lust (UAntwerpen / LUMI)
Sam Moors (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
Bart Oldeman (McGill University, Digital Research Alliance of Canada)
Jure Pečar (EMBL, Germany)
Jan Reuter (JSC, Germany)
Jörg Saßmannshausen (Imperial College London, UK)
Roberto Scipioni (Red Oak Consulting, UK)
Cintia Willemyns (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Agenda

overview of recent developments
2025a update of common toolchains
Q&A

Recent developments

latest EasyBuild release: EasyBuild v5.1.0 (26 May 2025)
next (stable) EasyBuild release: EasyBuid v5.1.1 (ETA: ASAP)

News

future easyconfigs merge sprints planned:
- Mon 18 Aug 2025
- Mon 13 Oct 2025
- Mon 15 Dec 2025
- Mon 16 Feb 2026
- aiming for semi-fixed schedule: 3rd Monday in even months

Merged PRs

(changed made in PRs marked with * are included latest EasyBuild stable release)

blog/docs (merged PRs)
- (delayed) blog post on EasyBuild v5.1.0 release
  - https://blog.easybuild.io/2025/05/27/easybuild-5.1.0
- Mikael will look into blog post on EasyBuild LSP
  - see also easyconfigs PR #23009
- Alex will look into blog post on reproducibly creating source tarballs from Git repositories
framework (merged PRs)
- bug fixes
  - also copy patches of extensions to easybuild subdirectory of installation directory (PR #4939 + PR #4946)
  - also copy easyblocks of bundle components to reprod dir (PR #4944)
- enhancements
  - don't allow using --pr-commit-msg when only adding new files with --new-pr (unless --force is used) (PR #4498)
- changes
  - Change value of architectures constants RISCV32 and RISCV64 (PR #4915)
  - trigger post_easyblock_hook later (PR #4938)
- code cleanup
  - ...
- CI/test suite
  - add support for passing valid unittest options to test suite (PR #3790)
easyblocks (merged PRs)
- bug fixes
  - disable trace output when unpacking crates in Cargo easyblock (PR #3750)
  - Set $HOME to temporary folder for TensorFlow build and tests (PR #3751)
  - Use self.start_dir in LLVM easyblock (PR #3770)
  - Fix test step for CMakeNinja easyblock by customizing test_cmd and runtest easyconfig parameters (PR #3771)
  - Reset runtest for components in a bundle (PR #3775)
  - don't forcibly set $LD_LIBRARY_PATH in LAMMPS sanity check (PR #3776)
  - Fix condition to ignore failed LLVM GPU tests (PR #3819)
  - fix --module-only builds for Term::ReadLine::Gnu (PR #3808)
  - fix use of self.cfg.dependencies() in CMake easyblock (PR #3810)
  - Fix LLVM easyblock to allow building with multiple versions at once (PR #3812)
  - fix use of self.cfg.dependencies() in OpenFOAM easyblock (PR #3814)
  - Do not create compiler configs for LLVM < 19 (PR #3817)
  - Fix condition to ignore failed LLVM GPU tests (PR #3819)
- enhancements
  - Allow test case filtering and other unittest arguments (PR #3653)
  - enhance LLVM easyblock to use dlopen for AMDGPU/CUDA libomptarget / offload target libraries (PR #3747)
  - enhance PythonPackage to allow specifying location to temporary installation used in test step + also update $PATH to pick up on binaries/scripts from it (PR #3797)
  - Add support for UCX, CUDA and mpi_abi directly in MPICH easyblock (PR #3807)
  - Add support for hwloc to MPICH easyblock (PR #3821)
- updates
  - update numpy easyblock to support installing numpy >= 2.0 (PR #3777)
- changes
  - change ABAQUS easyblock to use LM_LICENSE_FILE instead of ABAQUSLM_LICENSE_FILE (PR #3794)
- new easyblocks
  - add new easyblock for BLIS and AOCL-BLAS (PR #3773)
- code cleanup
  - handle $PATH environment variable with module_load_environment in init of Binary easyblock (PR #3787)
  - simplify use of self.cfg.dependencies() in SLEPc easyblock (PR #3811)
  - simplify use of self.cfg.dependencies() in PETSc easyblock (PR #3813)
- CI
  - ...
easyconfigs (merged PRs)
- XXX easyconfig PRs were merged since last conf call
- bug fixes/reports
  - ...
- enhancements
  - ...
- (noteworthy) new software
  - ...
- noteworthy software updates
  - ...
- cleanup
  - ...
- changes
  - ...

Open (active) PRs

docs (open PRs + issues)
- there still are some gaps in documentation that covers changed in EasyBuild 5.0.0
  - for example: https://docs.easybuild.io/interactive-debugging-failing-shell-commands
framework (open PRs + issues)
- bugs
  - Correctly detect final path when extracting multiple tarballs (PR #4922)
  - Fix logic for pr_repo used in --sync-pr-with-develop (PR #4947)
- enhancements
  - Proposed changes to make EasyBuild plugin-able through entrypoints (PR #4918)
    - only works with Python 3.9+
    - we should deprecate support for running EasyBuild on top of Python <3.9
  - make NVHPC a full toolchain with nvidia-compilers, NVHPCX and NVBLAS (PR #4927)
  - introduce XORG_*_URLS and GNU_FTP_URLS template constants (PR #4935)
  - retry fetching extensions from PyPI with alternative download_filename (PR #4943)
- code cleanup
  - ...
- changes
  - empty install dir but don't remove it (PR #4932)
easyblocks (open PRs + issues)
- bug fixes/reports
  - Fix use of CUDA CCs in LLVM easyblock and cleanup (PR #3755)
  - Moved several pieces of logic from the __init__ to configure_step in LLVM easyblock (PR #3781)
  - Update Mesa easyblock to use not use removed swrast (PR #3790)
  - use property for gcc_prefix/gcc_root in LLVM easyblock (PR #3793)
  - Moving openmp to a runtime in newer versions of LLVM (PR #3799)
  - Add missing call to make_module_step for components in Bundle easyblock (PR #3801)
  - Installing libiberty via binutils flag --enable-install-libiberty can break lib64 symlink (issue #3804)
  - Refactor LLVM easyblock and install OpenMP library symlinks (PR #3815)
  - move libiberty.a binutils library to 'lib' subdirectory if it's the only file in 'lib64' subdirectory (PR #3822)
- enhancements
  - Changes to Easyblocks needed to work with the new LLVM toolchain (PR #3759)
  - Set $NCCL_HOME in NCCL easyblock (PR #3782)
  - Show status of component installation (Bundle easyblock) (PR #3783)
  - enhance LAMMPS easyblock to select best performing FFT library (PR #3784)
  - Add option to CMakeMake to specify name of build directory (PR #3786)
  - add option to run unittests of LAMMPS (PR #3789)
  - symlink CUPTI files to standard locations in CUDA installation (PR #3791)
  - Add test for PyTorch test-results (XML files) parsing (PR #3803)
- updates
  - Update TensorFlow easyblock for CUDA support in TensorFlow 2.18+ (PR #3765)
  - update ORCA easyblock for version 6.1.0 (PR #3796)
- changes
  - Deprecate the Clang Easyblock in Favor of the LLVM one for newer (>=18.1.6) versions of LLVM (PR #3746)
- code cleanup
  - ...
- new easyblocks
  - new easyblock for vscodeextension (PR #3802)
easyconfigs (open PRs + issues)
- ~650 open easyconfig PRs \o/
- bug fixes/reports
  - ...
- enhancements
  - ...
- (noteworthy) new software
  - ...
- software updates
  - PyTorch 2.6.0 w/ foss/2024a (PR #22824)
- changes
  - ...

`2025b` common toolchains

will likely be set in stone Aug/Sept'25
GCC 14.3.0 (PR #22942) will be the base for foss/2025b and intel/2025b
- Python 3.13.5 w/ GCC/14.3.0 (PR #23027)

Q&A / others

(Jan) update on ROCm
- getting close to start opening PRs for installing ROCm from source in EasyBuild (starting with ROCM-LLVM)
- easyblocks PR #3799 result in need for an extra patch for ROCM-LLVM to fix bug
- (Kurt) little benefit for quite a lot of effort when building ROCm from source
- (Jan) 50+ packages that come with ROCm, takes ~1 day to build from source (also for AMD)
  - currently ~30 easyconfigs for ROCm packages (not including AI stuff)
  - ROCm sources had to be patched to stop relying op /opt/rocm hardcoded paths
  - only serious problems with roc-gdb when building in a container
(Bart) Have ILP64 working for BLIS, centrally we only have that for OpenBLAS
- AOCL-LAPACK works pretty well, passes LAPACK test suite
(Jörg) PETSc w/ foss/2024a (easyconfig PR #23252)
- Jörg is running into EasyBuild crash with this, will share details in PR
(Mikael) installing LLVM 20.x takes very long (>7h) and produces failing ~50 tests (some due to timeout)
- (Jan) LLVM 20.x includes Flang, which blows up build time quite a bit
- (Davide) should take about 3 hours
- (Mikael) maybe using cache in home dir?!
(Mikael) LLVM dependency for Mesa
- "minimal" dependency LLVM in existing Mesa easyconfig => PR open to fix
(Mikael) Pillow-SIMD isn't actually Pillow-SIMD at all
- bug fix PRs open
(Jörg) anyone familiar with NAG?
- quite expensive license
- users need a lot of numerical accuracy/stability
- see question in #random in EasyBuild Slack
- Cholesky factorization is in LAPACK, non-linear optimization is (maybe) supported by NLopt
- Gurobi may also be relevant? (also commercial, but somewhat affordable for academic use)