Hello EasyBuilders,
With summer approaching rapidly (I'm sure you're aware), it's time to
look into defining the 2015b update of the common compiler toochains
'foss' and 'intel'.
For those of you not aware yet: the common toolchains are an attempt at
synchronizing the major toolchains being used with EasyBuild across
different sites, to try and reap the benefits of each others efforts
even more. The idea is to refresh these toolchains every 6 months.
It's important to note that we are not enforcing these toolchains on
anyone: it's up to you whether you join in or not, and other toolchains
and toolchain versions will of course remain supported as they have been
in the past (with the exception of some old toolchains that I'd like to
deprecate sometime soon (goalf, iqacml), but more on that later).
I've taken the liberty to come up with a proposal for foss/2015b and
intel/2015b, see also the respective pull requests
https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/1695 and
https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/1696.
foss/2015b:
GCC v5.1.0
binutils/2.25 (which implies also including zlib/1.2.8)
OpenMPI v1.8.5 (note: with 1.8.6 likely to be released very soon,
this may get bumped before the definition is cast into stone)
OpenBLAS 0.2.14
FFTW 3.3.4
ScaLAPACK 2.0.2
intel/2015b:
(GCC v5.1.0 + binutils/2.25)
Intel compilers (icc + ifort) 2015.3.187 (a.k.a. 15.0.3.187)
Intel MPI v5.0.3.048
Intel MKL v11.2.3.187
A couple of notes on this:
* The most significant change is including binutils into these
toolchains (which also reels in zlib).
The reason for this is analogous to the reason for including GCC in
the intel toolchain: to be independent from what the OS provides.
This is very relevant for RHEL6-based Haswell systems, where the
standard binutils version included is too old to support AVX2 (cfr.
https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/issues/1605), as
several EasyBuild sites have discovered.
* After careful consideration, we bumped the GCC version to the latest
an greatest 5.1.0, despite it being a new major version.
There are several reasons for this, including better OpenMP 4.0 and
C+11 support in GCC 5.1.0, and the 2nd most recent 4.9.2 being rather
old (Oct'14).
Other communities have explored the impact of moving to GCC 5.1.0
(e.g.
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-February/207549.html).
Although the impact significant, it's limited to a small set of
packages, and the pros outweigh the cons in my opinion.
* Other changes include bumping the versions to the latest and greatest.
Preliminary testing using Python and Boost has shown that rebuilding
existing 2014b easyconfigs doesn't yield too much surprises.
I'm planning to run further tests in the coming weeks rebuilding
existing easyconfigs using the 2014b toolchains, but unless major issues
pop up, I consider these 2015b toolchain definitions solid.
Feedback, suggestions and/or remarks are much appreciated, both in this
mail thread and via the respective pull requests.
Unless major concerns come forward, my intention is to include these
2015b toolchains + several easyconfigs using them in the next EasyBuild
release (v2.2.0, planned for end of June/early July).
Last but not least: please refrain from using these 2015b toolchains in
production until the respective pull requests are merged. Until then,
the toolchain definitions may still be tweaked (and probably will be for
foss/2015b w.r.t. the OpenMPI version)!
regards,
Kenneth
