Hi,
As a part of effort to make releases smoother and uneventful, ensuring
CI/CD system stability is paramount. Therefore, the following updates have been
made to CI and CD pipelines of v1.x to make future 1.x releases hassle free
1. Migrating all binary generation mechanisms from Make to CMake + Ninja to
ensure faster builds making them consistent with master
2. Added support for latest CUDA 11.2 + CUDNN support
3. Updating CI/CD images to ubuntu 18.04 as current images are on ubuntu
16.04 and they will reach EOL on 30 April, 2021
4. The current MXNet binary now links dynamically to all Nvidia libraries
like NCCL, cuDNN etc. making it Apache compliant
5. Removal of 2 unnecessary test suites each from of unix-cpu and
miscellaneous CI systems.
PR: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/pull/19974 (Merged into v1.x)
IMO there are still certain test suits present in unix-cpu/gpu CI systems that
can be combined together to reduce complexity of the CI tests making them
faster, more stable and coherent with the master branch. Also, there is a mix
of Make and Cmake+ninja build configurations in CI that can be made uniform by
making all of them as CMake + Ninja build system.
I would like to know the thoughts of the community on the work
done(agree/disagree), opinion regarding further simplification of CI system and
suggestions regarding additional improvements that can strengthen our CI/CD
systems.
-Rohit
