Dear EasyBuilders,
The next update of the foss/intel common toolchains (2018b) is due soon
(end of June, cfr. [1]), so I've started looking into which options we
have in order to have sufficient time to thoroughly test the toolchain
definitions...
First of all: I think we can/should bump the GCC underneath both
foss/2018b and intel/2018b to v7.3.0.
We stuck with GCC 6.4.0 with the 2018a update because of concerns w.r.t.
the compatibility of GCC 7.x with the most recent Intel compilers at the
time.
Therefore, I contacted Intel support again to get an update, here's the
response I got:
"We started support GCC 7.1 or above from Intel C++ Compiler 2019 Beta.
However we don't see any known issue regarding GCC 7.3 specifically.
Internally we used it without a problem with 2018 Update2."
I consider that sufficient to go forward with GCC 7.3.0 as a base for
the */2018b toolchains. Of course we'll test extensively whether we see
any problems (by rebuilding existing easyconfigs that use the */2018a
toolchains with */2018b).
For foss/2018a we stuck to OpenMPI v2.1.2 even though there already was
an OpenMPI v3.0 which was supposedly stable. Now that OpenMPI v3.1.0 is
available, it makes sense to use that in foss/2018b.
W.r.t. OpenBLAS: there was (finally!) a new release just a couple of
days ago (v0.3.0) [2]. This includes a couple of important fixes &
updates (e.g. LAPACK 3.8.0), so that is the most sensible choice for
foss/2018b.
For the other toolchain components only less significant minor updates
seem to be available (i.e. 2018 update 2 for Intel components).
This leads to the following initial proposals for the 2018b common
toolchains:
++ proposal for foss/2018b ++
- GCC 7.3.0 + binutils 2.30 (release dates: 2018-01-25, 2018-01-28)
- OpenMPI 3.1.0 (2018-05-07)
- OpenBLAS 0.3.0 (2018-05-23)
- FFTW 3.3.7* (2017-10-29)
- ScaLAPACK 2.0.2 (2012-05-01)
(*) FFTW seems to be close to a new release (3.3.8), based on the recent
commit history [3], so if it's there in time we should use that.
++ proposal for intel/2018a ++
- (GCCcore 7.3.0 + binutils 2.30 as a base)
- Intel compilers 2018 update 2, a.k.a. 2018.2.199 (2018-03-21)
- Intel MPI 2018 update 2 (2018-03-22)
- Intel MKL 2018 update 2 (2018-03-22)
Feedback & comments are welcome.
regards,
Kenneth
[1]
http://easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Common-toolchains.html#update-cycle-for-common-toolchains
[2] https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/releases/tag/v0.3.0
[3] https://github.com/FFTW/fftw3/commits/master
