Conference call notes 20250910 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 278th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday 10 Sept 2025 (08:00 UTC / 10:00 CEST)

Attendees

List of attendees (24):

• Xavier Besseron (LuxProvide, Luxembourg)
• Simon Branford (Univ. of Birmingham, UK)
• Jorge Delgado Guerrero (University of Luxembourg)
• Loris Ercole (CECAM, Switzerland)
• Davide Grassano (CECAM, Switzerland)
• Jasper Grimm (University of York, UK)
• Alexander Grund (ZIH, Dresden, Germany)
• Leonardo Honfi Camilo (Wageningen University, The Netherlands)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Adam Huffman (University of Oxford, UK)
• Georgios Kafanas (University of Luxembourg)
• Emik Lin (Univ. of Hong Kong)
• Kurt Lust (UAntwerpen / LUMI)
• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Iker Ortiz de Luzuriaga (DIPC, Spain)
• Jure Pečar (EMBL, Germany)
• Steffen Reichert (ZIH, Dresden, Germany)
• Jan Reuter (JSC, Germany)
• Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)
• Jörg Saßmannshausen (Imperial College London, UK)
• Roberto Scipioni (Red Oak Consulting, UK)
• Helena Vela (Do It Now)
• Bart Verheyde (UCB)
• Cintia Willemyns (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Agenda

• overview of recent developments
• update of common toolchains
• Q&A

Recent developments

• latest EasyBuild release: EasyBuild v5.1.1 (6 July 2025)
• next (stable) EasyBuild release: EasyBuid v5.1.2 (ETA: ASAP)
  • framework milestone
  • easyblocks milestone
  • easyconfigs milestone
• hopefully relatively quick release of EasyBuild v5.2.0 afterwards
  • incl. support for LLVM-based toolchain, NVHPC toolchain, etc.
  • ETA early Oct'25 (?)

News

• ...

Merge sprints

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

Merged PRs

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

• blog/docs (merged PRs)

  • ...

• framework (merged PRs)

  • bug fixes
    • fix passing command as list of strings to run_shell_cmd (PR #4977)
    • try to empty install dir if removing it fails (PR #4932)
  • enhancements
    • introduce PYTHON_EXE variable in template for RPATH wrapper script (to easily replace name of python command to use in buildenv easyblock) (PR #4984)
    • Skip RPATH sanity check for symlinks explicitely (PR #4988)
    • take --terse into account for --dry-run-short/-D and --dry-run (PR #4989)
  • changes
    • Don't log variables (un)set + raw output of module command when cleaning up fake module (PR #4942)
  • code cleanup
    • ...
  • CI/test suite
    • ...

• easyblocks (merged PRs)

  • bug fixes
    • Explicitly set LAPACK/BLAS to FlexiBLAS if present in OpenCV (PR #3874
    • Fix sanity check step of LLVM by loading binutils as extra module (PR #3899)
    • change OpenFOAM easyblock to not use cp -a, might fail with NFS ACLs on install directory (PR #3916)
  • enhancements
    • allow bypass of update_amber in custom easyblock for Amber/AmberTools (PR #3901)
    • add custom easyconfig parameter for LLVM to ignore timed out tests (PR #3903)
  • updates
    • update Mesa easyblock to remove osmesa part of the sanity check, since that's removed from Mesa 25.1 onwards (PR #3896)
  • changes
    • ...
  • new
    • ...
  • code cleanup
    • remove disabling libunwind on aarch64 for Mesa (PR #3908)
  • CI
    • ...

• easyconfigs (merged PRs)

  • ~70 easyconfig PRs were merged since last conf call
  • bug fixes/reports
    • add patch for dask v2024.9.1 to fix incorrect indexing with boolean arrays (PR #23634)
    • fix sources for PARI-GP 2.15.x + add missing Bison build dependency (PR #23662)
    • update extensions for OCaml 4.14.0 and 5.1.1 to nearest version that is still available (PR #23664)
    • add patch to git easyconfigs to fix CVE-2025-48384 (PR #23769)
    • add patch to allow SymEngine v0.7 to compile with glibc >= 2.34 (PR #23817)
  • enhancements
    • also build static libraries of Abseil (PR #22805)
      • caused trouble for PyTorch-bundle, being fixed in PR #23823?
    • add patch for ESPResSo v4.2.2 to allow specifying target CUDA architectures ((PR #23795)
  • (noteworthy) new software
    • ...
  • noteworthy software updates
    • GROMACS v2025.2 (PR #23566)
    • ParaView v5.13.2 w/ foss/2024a (PR #22267)
    • GPAW + ELPA w/ foss/2025b (PR #23773)
  • cleanup
    • ...
  • changes
    • update Java/21 wrapper to Java v21.0.8 (PR #23677)

Open (active) PRs

• blog/docs (open PRs + issues)

  • add blog post about reproducible tarballs (blog PR #9)
  • add FlexiBLAS blog post (blog WIP PR #13)
  • Added documentation for entrypoints (docs WIP PR #331)
  • Environment Modules description improvements (docs PR #342)

• framework (open PRs + issues)

  • bugs
    • Make sure cached easyconfigs don't get modifed (PR #4818)
    • keep ModuleTool.mod_paths in sync with $MODULEPATH in ModuleTool.load() (PR #4991)
    • RPATH wrappers may be ignored if /tmp is mounted with /noexec (issue #4910)
    • use of %(installdir)s template results in "Failed to resolve all templates" (issue #4990)
  • enhancements
    • Possibly enabling oversubscribe/cpu-pinning in framework (issue #4993)
    • on hold until after EasyBuild v5.1.2 release:
      • implementing a new LLVM based toolchain (PR #4914)
        • related PRs:
          • Changes to easyblocks needed to work with the new LLVM toolchain (easyblocks PR #3759)
          • Add LLVM toolchain support for Boost (easyblocks PR #3855)
      • proposed changes to make EasyBuild plugin-able through entrypoints (PR #4918)
      • make NVHPC a full toolchain with nvidia-compilers, NVHPCX and NVBLAS (PR #4927)
      • click CLI wrapper around normal CLI (PR #4961)
  • code cleanup
    • ...
  • changes
    • on hold until after EasyBuild v5.1.2 release:
      • Deprecate support for running EasyBuild with Python < 3.9 (PR #4966)
  • tests
    • also with test Python 3.14 (WIP PR #4992)
      • premature since Python 3.14 is not released yet (only RCs)
      • only 2 failing tests, one of which due to 3.14.0rc2 version

• easyblocks (open PRs + issues)

  • bug fixes/reports
    • Accept arguments for sanity_check_step in HPL easyblock (PR #3904)
    • Load module in Bundle easyblock instead of components (PR #3905)
    • replace path to python executable with python3 in RPATH wrappers for buildenv easyblock (PR #3910)
    • Make HPL EasyBlock intel-aware and allow running the xhpl benchmark as a tests (PR #3917)
  • enhancements
    • Add test for PyTorch test-results (XML files) parsing (PR #3803)
    • add support to Python easyblock for conditionally adding patches when EasyBuild is configured to filter $LD_LIBRARY_PATH (PR #3860)
    • Improve error message when no files to copy where found in MakeCp easyblock (PR #3907)
    • Avoid using user-HOME when installing RPackage (PR #3911)
    • Set required Python environment variables when installing lammps Python package (PR #3915)
  • updates
    • Update jaxlib easyblock for jax/jaxlib v0.6.2 (PR #3852)
    • Update CP2K easyblock for v2024 and v2025 (PR #3892)
    • Update LAMMPS easyblock: v2025 fix + extra tests (PR #3894)
    • update CPLEX easyblock for CPLEX v22.1.2 (which doesn't include Python bindings anymore) (PR #3909)
  • changes
    • clean installation directory instead of hard removing it in various easyblocks (PR #3816)
  • code cleanup
    • ...
  • new easyblocks
    • ...

• easyconfigs (open PRs + issues)

  • bug fixes/reports
    • enhance patch file to show output when LAMMPS Python package failed to install (PR #23774)
    • Fix linking of RE2 in PyTorch-bundle (PR #23823)
    • add Simple-DFTD3 as dependency for CREST to avoid it being downloaded during the build (PR #23831)
  • enhancements
    • ...
  • (noteworthy) new software
    • ...
  • software updates
    • PyTorch v2.3.0 w/ foss/2023b + CUDA 12.4.0 (PR #23553)
    • PyTorch v2.6.0 w/ CUDA 12.6.0 (PR #23433)
    • CP2K v2025.2 w/ foss/2025a (PR #23696)
    • QuantumESPRESSO 7.5 with foss/2025a (PR #23798) and foss/2025b (PR #23799)
    • OpenFOAM v13 w/ foss/2025a (PR #23716)
      • blocked by ParaView v6.0.0 (PR #23671)
        • blocked by Mesa v25.1.3 w/ GCCcore/14.2.0 (PR #23144)
          • why is this stuck?
  • changes
    • ...

Common toolchains

2025b

• foss/2025b + intel/2025b defined, easyconfigs will be included in upcoming EasyBuild v5.1.2 release (easyconfigs PR #23708)
• lots of relevant easyconfig PRs merged already

2026a

• ETA early 2026
• will likely use GCC 15.x as base...

Q&A / others

• (Jan) PRs for Kokkos
  • easyblocks PR #3893
  • known issue for Kokkos on Arm CPUs + CUDA, see also EESSI issue #162
• (Jan) HPC-Toolkit
  • can now built with just Meson rather than requiring Spack (released last week)
  • easyconfigs PR #23830
  • some tests require permission to access GPU performance counters
    • eventually would be interesting to have a custom easyblock that does a "double take" on tests and prints a warning when performance counters are not usable
  • Mikael is interesting is looking into this
  • Jörg will submit test reports from different systems
• (Jörg) updating SciPy-bundle to intel toolchain
  • issues with iimk/2025b should be fixed
  • see easyconfigs PR #23826
• (Alexander) playing with EESSI
  • rebuilding modules to use $EBPYTHONPREFIXES instead of $PYTHONPATH
  • script that handles $EBPYTHONPREFIX is missing in Python installation included in EESSI (or is in a different place)