Conference call notes 20210609

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Notes on the 174th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday June 9th 2021 (08:00 UTC)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (XXX):

• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)

• Sebastian Achilles (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany)

• Simon Branford (University of Birmingham, UK)

• Bennet Fauber (Univ. of Michigan, US)

• Alexander Grund (TU Dresden, Germany)

• Victor Holanda Rusu (CSCS, Switzerland)

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

• Terje Kvernes (Univ. of Oslo, Norway)

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

• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

• Bart Oldeman (Compute Canada)

• Jörg Saßmannshausen (NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, UK)

• Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)

Agenda

• overview of recent developments
• Q&A

Recent developments

• last release: EasyBuild v4.4.0 (June 2nd)
• ETA next release: early July
• recent changes
  • framework
    • bug fixes
      • various fixes for Fujitsu toolchain support (PR #3704, PR #3712, PR #3713, PR #3714, PR #3717, PR #3721, PR #3731)
      • fix support for specifying multiple PRs to --from-pr (PR #3707, PR #3708)
      • avoid overwritting pr_nr in post_pr_test_report for reports with --include-easyblocks-from-pr (PR #3724 + PR #3726)
        • results in posting test report in easyblock PR rather than easyconfigs PR, but only when running EasyBuild on top of Python 2
    • enhancements
      • add support for --skip-extensions (PR #3702)
      • support systems with more than 1024 cores (PR #3701)
    • changes
      • drop support for Python 2.6 (PR #3715)
  • easyblocks
    • bug fixes *
    • enhancements *
    • new software *
    • changes
      • (none)
  • easyconfigs
    • close 100 easyconfig PRs merged since last conf call
    • bug fixes
      • add patches for PyTorch 1.7.1 avoiding failures on POWER and A100 (PR #12753)
      • update GCC 10.2 binutils to 2.35.2 to fix fatal issues on PPC (PR #12920)
    • enhancements
      • ...
    • cleanup
      • ...
    • new software *
    • noteworthy software updates *
    • noteworthy changes *
• to merge/fix/tackle soon
  • framework
    • reported bugs / bug fixes
      • specified easyblock for extension is not taken into account (issue #3710)
      • fix crash in get_config_dict when copying modules that were imported in easyconfig file (like 'import os') (PR #3729, fixes issue #3727)
      • rebuilding module breaks for HMNS if there are sort-of circular builddependencies (e.g. XZ and gettext) (issue #3722)
    • enhancements
      • support additional features in easystack files
        • support for filtering via labels (PR #3620)
      • 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)
      • add make_extension_string and _make_extension_list to EasyBlock (PR #3697)
      • enhance detection of patch files with better error messages (PR #3709)
      • add per-step timing information (PR #3716)
      • add module-write hook (PR #3728)
      • add option to ignore failing test step (--ignore-test-failure) (PR #3732)
      • finding modules with multiple modulepaths and HMNS (issue #3703)
    • changes
      • make sure that tests requiring a github token have 'github' in the test name so that they can be easily filtered (PR #3730)
      • also enable static analysis for Python 2.7 (PR #3725)
        • catches accidentally overwriting local variables in list comprehensions (like --from-pr --include-easyblocks-from-pr bug)
  • easyblocks
    • bug fixes
      • treat files/directories of unpacked sources equally in PackedBinary (PR #2306)
      • --module-only doesn't always work as expected
        • we need a better way of catching this in tests
        • problem is that you typically need an actual installation to catch these problems, so can't be done in easyconfigs or easyblocks test suite run in CI
        • test installations done on generoso via boegelbot could be enhanced to catch problems with --module-only?
    • enhancements
      • enhance test and install step of CMakePythonPackage easyblock (PR #2318)
      • allow for Perl modules being part of other, already installed Perl modules (PR #2386)
      • including FlexiBLAS as the default BLAS in foss will require easyblock changes (issue #2421)
      • should set BLA_VENDOR in CMakeMake easyblock if BLAS is in the toolchain (PR #2420)
      • enhance sitecfg to support overriding core Python packages (PR #2458)
    • changes
      • (nothing major)
    • new software
      • new easyblock for NCCL (built from source) (PR #2337)
  • easyconfigs
    • bug fixes
      • improve check for multi-variant dependencies per generation of easyconfigs (PR #12687)
    • enhancements
      • (nothing major)
    • new software
      • (nothing major?)
    • software updates
      • SciPy-bundle

2021a update of common toolchains

• TODO: fosscuda/2021a
  • collapsing foss and fosscuda toolchains
  • see https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/issues/12484
  • status? (Mikael)
    • see easyconfigs PR #12866

Q&A