Conference call notes 20251022 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 281st EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday 22 Oct 2025 (15:00 UTC / 17:00 CEST)

Attendees

List of attendees (15):

  • Xavier Besseron (LuxProvide, Luxembourg)
  • Davide Grassano (CECAM)
  • Jasper Grimm (University of York, UK)
  • Alexander Grund (ZIH, Dresden, Germany)
  • Jorge Delgado Guerrero (University of Luxembourg)
  • Jack S. Hale (Univ. of Luxembourg)
  • Sven Hansen (RWTH, Germany)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Georgios Kafanas (University of Luxembourg)
  • Sébastien Moretti (SIB, Switzerland)
  • Alan O'Cais (freelancer)
  • Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
  • Bart Oldeman (McGill, CQ, Digital Research Alliance Canada)
  • Jarne Renders (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
  • Jan Reuter (JSC, Germany)

Agenda

  • quick evaluation of easyconfigs merge sprint
  • report on 1st meeting of PyTorch working group
  • overview of recent developments
  • update of common toolchains
  • Q&A

Recent developments

  • latest EasyBuild release: EasyBuild v5.1.2 (26 Sept 2025)
  • next (stable) EasyBuild release: EasyBuid v5.2.0 (ETA: end of Oct'25)
    • incl. support for LLVM-based toolchain, NVHPC toolchain, etc.

News

  • PyTorch working group kickstarted
    • first meeting was held on Thu 9 Oct'25, notes here
    • some clear action points defined...
    • next meeting scheduled for Thu 13 Nov'25 at 15:00 CET

Merge sprints

  • Mon 13 Oct 2025
    • ~100 PRs were merged/closed during merge sprint

    • open easyconfig PRs was pushed down with another ~30 in the wake of the merge sprint

    • diving under 500 open easyconfig PRs is in view
    • see also https://hackmd.io/W0mQ7qb8QCih_Vtr1m_w0Q?view
    • concept of bi-monthly merge sprint seems to be working, planning to keep organising one every other month
  • future easyconfigs merge sprints planned:
    • Mon 15 Dec 2025
    • Mon 16 Feb 2026
    • Mon 13 Apr 2026
    • Mon 15 Jun 2026
    • Mon 17 Aug 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
      • ...
    • enhancements
      • ...
    • changes
      • ...
    • code cleanup
      • ...
    • CI/test suite

  • easyblocks (merged PRs)

    • bug fixes
      • Unify handling of vendored crates in cargo EasyBlock and add support for non-virtual workspaces (PR #3665)
      • ensure all versioned symlinks are created for bzip2 (PR #3948)
      • enhance PythonPackage & PythonBundle easyblock to consider $EBPYTHONPREFIXES for test installs and path configuration files (PR #3953)
      • Move setting of $PYTHON* environment variables to load_module method in Python easyblock (PR #3958)
      • Fix MPIEXEC and improve handling of FlexiBLAS in GROMACS easyblock (PR #3959)
    • enhancements
      • enhance Bundle generic easyblock to support use of post-install patches (PR #3887)
      • add support to Python easyblock for conditionally applying extra patch to fix ctypes when EasyBuild is configured to filter $LD_LIBRARY_PATH (PR #3860 + PR #3965)
      • add support to PythonPackage easyblock to disable use of --no-build-isolation option for 'pip install' (PR #3954)
    • updates
      • Update TensorRT easyblock for TensorRT 10+ (PR #3554)
    • changes
      • change LLVM EasyBlock to not apply concurrency workaround for pre-release LLVM 20 (PR #3937)
    • new
      • ...
    • code cleanup
      • ...
    • CI
      • also run easyblocks test suite with Python 3.13 and 3.14 (PR #3955)

  • easyconfigs (merged PRs)

    • Over 200 easyconfig PRs were merged since last conf call \o/
    • bug fixes/reports
      • add patch for GCCcore 10.3-13.2 to fix AVX-512 vectorizer bug (upstream PR 114566) (PR #24073)
        • mostly relevant for systems with an AMD CPU that support AVX-512
      • fix Rust sysroot patch to properly skip libraries when setting the interpreter with patchelf (PR #24331)
    • enhancements
      • ...
    • (noteworthy) new software
      • numba-cuda v0.20.0 w/ foss/2025b + CUDA 12.9.1 (PR #24081)
    • noteworthy software updates
      • OpenFOAM v13 w/ foss/2025a (PR #23716)
      • TensorFlow 2.18.1 w/ foss/2024a + CUDA 12.6.0 (PR #22921)
    • cleanup
      • ...
    • changes
      • Drop ILP64 from LAPACKe in 2025b as FlexiBLAS doesn't support it (PR #24231)

Open (active) PRs

  • blog/docs (open PRs + issues)

  • framework (open PRs + issues)

    • bugs
      • pass dependencies to toolchain.prepare when setting up build environment for extensions (PR #5023)
        • fixes a problem with not finding header files provided by dependencies when using --search-path-cpp-headers=include_paths because $C_INCLUDE_PATH & co set by toolchain only include paths for toolchain components
      • Pass correct -march option on RISC-V systems when optarch toolchain option is enabled (PR #5029)
    • enhancements
      • Make specifying exts_defaultclass optional (PR #4800)
      • new LLVM based toolchain (PR #4914)
      • 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)
      • Add --keep-going option to fail at the end not at first failing installation (PR #5022)
      • Add templates for source with just version numbers (PR #5025)
      • Add templates for patch versions (PR #5028)
    • code cleanup
      • ...
    • changes
      • Deprecate support for running EasyBuild with Python < 3.9 (PR #4966)
    • tests
      • Add decorator to ignore PR test failures due to rate limit (PR #5019)

  • easyblocks (open PRs + issues)

    • bug fixes/reports
      • Potentially wrong cblas.h in OpenBLAS installations with 64bit support (issue #3872)
      • Update Clang easyblock for fixed 'finalpath' source attributes (PR #3961)
    • enhancements
    • updates
      • Update CP2K easyblock for v2024 and v2025 (PR #3892)
      • Update LAMMPS easyblock: v2025 fix + extra tests (PR #3894)
      • Update jaxlib easyblock for jax 0.6.2 with CUDA-12.6.0 (PR #3951)
    • changes
      • ...
    • code cleanup
      • ...
    • new easyblocks
      • new easyblock for systemd_wrapper (WIP PR #3963)
        • use case for this was xorg-server, but also other things like nvtop eed udev

  • easyconfigs (open PRs + issues)

    • bug fixes/reports
      • add patch to Python easyconfigs to fix ctypes when $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not being set (PR #23499)
      • Fix mlir-pdll-lsp-server of Clang-18 (PR #24327)
      • Fix python-igraph EasyConfigs to use installed igraph (PR #24288)
    • enhancements
      • ...
    • (noteworthy) new software
      • Fluxbox + Openbox window managers (PR #24280) + jgmenu (PR #24323)
        • (Mikael) some recent progress with xfce + Wayland on accelerated desktop environment
          • Xorg is a dead end, we should focus on next-gen solution like Wayland instead
    • software updates
      • PyTorch v2.3.0 w/ foss/2023b + CUDA 12.4.0 (PR #23553)
      • PyTorch v2.6.0 w/ foss/2024a + CUDA 12.6.0 (PR #23433)
      • PyTorch v2.7.1 w/ foss/2024a + CUDA 12.6.0 (PR #23923)
      • CP2K v2025.2 w/ foss/2025a (PR #23696)
      • NVHPC 25.9 (PR #23989)
    • changes
      • ...

Common toolchains

2026a

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

Q&A / other

  • introductions by Jarne, Jack, Sven
  • feedback from Jarne as new user
    • good to know what best practices are
    • for example how to deal with failures in CI in GitHub
  • Jack: interested in getting FEniCS into EESSI
  • (Mikael) how is FlexiBLAS planning to deal with 64-bit builds of backend libraries?
  • (Davide) support for "breakpoints" to be able to jump in after configure step
  • (Mikael) problems with tests for ADIOS2
    • see easyconfig PRs #23215 (Alain), #24194 (Mikael), #24316 (Davide)
    • tests seems flaky...
      • we should reach out to upstream, ask if this is a known issue?
      • consider doing multiple iterations for make test, essentially trying again in case of failing tests to allow for flaky tests?
        • similar to what we start doing for jax recently
  • (Jan) reminder for PRs for AMD ROCm:
  • (Jan) custom easyblock for Kokkos + corresponding easyconfig are ready to go