Conference call notes 20250409

(back to Conference calls)

Notes on the 267th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday 9 April 2025 (15:00 UTC / 17:00 CEST)

Attendees

List of attendees (16):

• Simon Branford (Univ. of Birmingham, UK)
• 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)
• Georgios Kafanas (University of Luxembourg)
• Kurt Lust (UAntwerpen / LUMI)
• Sébastien Moretti (SIB, Switzerland)
• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Bart Oldeman (McGill University, Digital Research Alliance of Canada)
• Andrea Piserchia (E4)
• Jan Reuter (JSC, Germany)
• Jörg Saßmannshausen (Imperial College London, UK)
• Alex Domingo (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• Cintia Willemyns (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Agenda

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

Recent developments

• latest EasyBuild release: EasyBuild v5.0.0 (18 March 2025) 🥳
• next (stable) EasyBuild release: EasyBuid v5.0.1 (soon, days-not-weeks)

News

• 5.0.x branches have been removed, all active development is now done in develop branch (again)
  • main branch corresponds to latest stable release
  • 5.0.x branch may temporarily return during release process of upcoming EasyBuild v5.0.x releases
  • PRs that were opened before release of EasyBuild v5.0.0 should be synced with current develop branch (+ test report with EasyBuild v5.0.0)
• slides & recordings of EUM'25 talks available via https://easybuild.io/eum25/#program
• EasyBuild + EESSI shop: https://shop.easybuild.io
  • for now, only coffee mugs...
• EasyBuild blog: https://blog.easybuild.io
  • first blog post: report on EUM'25
  • hoping to have at least one blog post per month
  • topics:
    • events
    • release announcements
    • feature highlights
    • EasyBuild sites showing how they use EasyBuild?
  • all help welcome!
  • ideas
    • Alex' work on reproducible source tarballs
    • Mikael's LSP
• structural merge sprints to be planned
  • once a month, fixed day?
  • pairing up of maintainer with frequent contributor?

Merged PRs

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

• docs (merged PRs)

  • ...

• framework (merged PRs)

  • bug fixes
    • Avoid processing the same EasyConfig multiple times (PR #4767*)
    • Fix quoting of command in setup shell script (PR #4792*)
    • Don't expand paths being considered for generated module file for temporary 'fake' module file to avoid filtering out paths for directories that don't exist yet (PR #4809*)
    • Avoid unecessary warning about skipping checksum verification of Git repos (PR #4813*)
    • Add --max-parallel configuration option to control maximum number of cores to use, set to 16 by default (PR #4816*)
    • Fix help string of findPythonDeps.py (PR #4821)
    • Fix missed message in trivial equal-asserts (PR #4831)
    • Avoid failure when only some passed easyconfigs exist (PR #4847)
  • enhancements
    • Ignore other classes if software specific easyblock class was found (PR #4769*)
    • Allow test case filtering by class name (PR #4788*)
    • Also allow trailing whitespaces for examples and citing easyconfig parameters (PR #4796)
    • Improve test failure output for assertEqual (PR #4807*)
  • changes
    • ...
  • code cleanup
    • make python2_is_deprecated function cause an exit when using Python 2 (PR #4810)
    • update list of defaults for silence_deprecation_warnings (PR #4811)
    • remove source tarball for Python 3.7.2 from test sources (PR #4828)
  • CI
    • Modernize tests that require GitHub token (PR #4776)
    • clean up easyblocks included in test_github_xxx_include_easyblocks_from_pr to avoid breaking other tests (PR #4822*)
    • fix milestone used in test_github_merge_pr (PR #4824*)
    • go back to using develop branch rather than 5.0.x branch in GitHub Actions workflows (PR #4820)
    • fix test_github_preview_pr which got broken because there's no more easyconfigs for bzip2 1.0.6 in easyconfigs repo (PR #4827)
    • Fix tests after removal of 5.0.x branch (PR #4830)
    • Delete .coveragerc (PR #4833)
    • fix wrong variable name used for Python version in linting CI (PR #4839)
    • Fix failing GitHub integration CI tests (PR #4841)
    • fix testsuite badge (PR #4845)

• easyblocks (merged PRs)

  • bug fixes
    • Fix cargo build when git branch is referenced (PR #3654*)
    • Explicitly disable libxml2 support in LLVM easyblock if libxml2 is not available as dependency (PR #3657*)
    • Make AOCC compiler wrappers aware of keepsymlinks option (PR #3659*)
    • convert RUNPATH into RPATH for Rust binaries in recent Rust versions (> 1.79.0) (PR #3660*)
    • fix use of run_shell_cmd in PyTorch easyblock to check for xmlrunner (PR #3664*)
    • Update QuantumESPRESSO easyblock to use cfg.parallel property (PR #3688)
    • Fix LLVM build on non-x86 (PR #3674)
      • this PR introduced a bug that needs to be fixed before we push out EasyBuild v5.0.1, see comments in PR
  • enhancements
    • add back easyblock for fastStructure, ported to run_shell_cmd and module_load_environment (PRs #3642 + #3692)
  • updates
    • ...
  • changes
    • Use PythonPackage as the default_easyblock for PythonBundle (PR #3649*)
  • new easyblocks
    • ...
  • code cleanup
    • Recursive glob expansion of library files in GROMACS and convert lib_subdirs into a property (PR #3641*)
  • CI
    • ...

• easyconfigs (merged PRs)

  • XXX easyconfig PRs were merged since last conf call
  • bug fixes/reports
    • ...
  • enhancements
    • ...
  • (noteworthy) new software
    • ...
  • noteworthy software updates
    • PyTorch v2.3.0 (PR #20489)
  • 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)

  • bug fixes
    • Regression: CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH=lib added to modulefiles (PR #4844 )
  • enhancements
    • Add capability to export RPATH wrappers for a toolchain (PR #4596)
    • add a CUDA device code sanity check (PR #4692)
  • code cleanup
    • ...
  • changes
    • ...

• easyblocks (open PRs + issues)

  • bug fixes/reports
    • ...
  • enhancements
    • Enhance LLVM EasyBlock to better handle offload builds and test failures (PR #3675)
      • includes fix for bug introduced in PR #3674
  • updates
    • ...
  • changes
    • ...
  • code cleanup
    • ...
  • new easyblocks
    • ...

• easyconfigs (open PRs + issues)

  • ~1.1k open easyconfig PRs
    • we're (over)due for a cleanup of backlog of old/stale easyconfigs PRs
    • closing PRs that are only using unsupported/deprecated toolchains, see https://docs.easybuild.io/policies/toolchains/#current-situation
  • bug fixes/reports
    • ...
  • enhancements
    • ...
  • (noteworthy) new software
    • ...
  • software updates
    • ...
  • changes
    • ...

2025a common toolchains

• (2024b is skipped to catch up with original schedule for defining common toolchain versions)
  • EasyBuild v5.0 is ideal excuse for that break in continuity...
• GCC 14.2 as a base (see easyconfigs PR #21114)
• we should define candidate toolchains using latest version of all components
• easyconfigs using GCCcore/14.2.0 toolchain available for Python 3.13.1, Perl + Perl-bundle-CPAN 5.40.0
• effort sort of on hold until EasyBuild v5.0.0 is released...
• easyconfigs PR #22125 for FlexiBLAS, OpenBLAS, BLIS
• trouble with maturin (required for cryptography, required for Python-bundle-PyPI), escapes RPATH (PR #22349)
• updates for intel-compilers and impi in PR #22657

Q&A / others

• Mikael's colleague looking into enhancing bot that provides feedback/add labels in easyconfig PRs
  • to help with more efficiently processing PRs
• Alex: don't require that CUDA is a direct dependency to define %(cudaver)s like template
• Alex: experiences with NVHPC?
  • our NVHPC easyconfigs only bundle the compilers
  • nvompi toolchains on top
  • pretty brittle, -M options only use if you use libraries that come with NVHPC installation
    • like -Mscalapack (which gets translated to -lscalapack_lp64, a library provided by OpenMPI included in NVHPC)
  • NVHPC easyblock strips things down by default, but can be used otherwise
  • was partially done because they didn't build OpenMPI with their own compiler
  • present concrete proposal for how to go forward with NVHPC in future conf call?
  • NVHPC-based installations are relatively rare use cases (like V*SP, or software implemented in OpenACC)
  • NVHPC easyconfigs should be renamed to NVIDIA-compilers?