Dear EasyBuilders,
I'm excited to announce the release of EasyBuild version 3.6.0 [1].
I hate to disappoint you, but this time this isn't the best release up
until now...
Just kidding, got you, didn't I? :)
This is a major release, including several cool new features.
The flagship feature of this release is initial integration with
Singularity, which was co-developed with Shahzeb Siddiqui (Pfizer) over
the last couple of weeks (& months), with feedback from many others.
EasyBuild now has support for generating Singularity container recipes
via --containerize, and can also leverage Singularity to build container
images from those recipes (which requires 'sudo' rights).
The current implementation is by no means perfect yet; in particular,
several things are still hard-coded currently, and you will need to
build a base container image first that matches the requirements.
As such, this is an experimental feature, so you will need to enable the
--experimental configuration setting if you want to use this.
Documentation describing the details is available at
http://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Containers.html.
Please submit issues to report rough edges or problems via
https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/issues/new,
after consulting the issues that have been reported already at
https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/labels/containers.
Work is already under way to extend this containerization support to
Docker as well (see [2])...
Other highlights include:
* -ftree-vectorize and -fno-math-errno are now included in
the default compiler optimization flags for GCC
- this significantly benefits the performance of resulting
binaries (e.g., ~10% speedup with TensorFlow built with foss)
- if needed, this can be disabled using the new 'vectorize'
toolchain option
* several enhancements/fixes to GitHub integration support
* support for "eb --fetch" to only pre-download sources
(even without having a modules tool available)
* support for 'depends_on' load statements in generated modules
(requires Lmod >= 7.6.1)
* support for 39 new software packages, incl. BamBam, Nim & udocker
* updates for already supported software, incl.
dask 0.17.2, FFmpeg 4.0, GCC(core) 7.3.0, GROMACS 2016.5,
LLVM 6.0.0, netCDF 4.6.0, R 3.4.4, Spack 0.11.2, TensorFlow 1.7.0
* toolchain updates: goolfc/2018a, intel/2018.02, iomkl/2018.02, ...
* removal of an ancient version of the Time::HiRes Perl extension
that got included by accident in recent Perl easyconfigs
This brings the total number of supported software packages to 1,437!
An up-to-date list of supported software is available at
http://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/version-specific/Supported_software.html
.
A detailed overview of all changes is available in the release notes,
see http://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Release_notes.html.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release in one way or another!
To upgrade to EasyBuild v3.6.0, there are several options [3].
Two particularly easy options include:
* eb --install-latest-eb-release
# this requires EasyBuild v3.3.0 or more recent since support
for SHA256 checksums is required
* eb --from-pr 6241 # use easyconfig from PR #6241 [4]
Enjoy!
regards,
Kenneth (a.k.a. boegel)
EasyBuild release manager
[1] https://pypi.org/project/easybuild/3.6.0
[2] https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-framework/pull/2479
[3]
http://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Installation.html#updating-an-existing-easybuild-installation
[4] https://github.com/easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/6241/files
