HPC goodies in Guix 0.14.0

Version 0.14.0 of Guix was announced yesterday. In this post we look at the many goodies that made it into Guix during this release cycle.

Over the 1,200+ packages added since the 0.13.0 release are many noteworthy HPC additions.

Dave Love of the University of Manchester made a number of contributions on the high-performance networking side:

• Dave added several InfiniBand packages, added PSM support in libfabric.
• Open MPI gained support for RDMA, libfabric, and PSM.
• The Intel MPI Benchmarks are now available as a package.
• The size of the closure of the openmpi package with all its dependencies was significantly reduced. This is particularly appreciable if you’re building application bundles with guix pack.

The collection of HPC profiling tools has grown:

• PAPI;
• Score-P;
• otf2;
• OPARI2;
• CUBE.

Linear algebra packages have seen some changes:

• LAPACK was upgraded to 3.7.1, though 3.5.0 has been kept around for packages that are not ready for the latest API.
• Scotch is now built in 64-bit mode on 64-bit machines, and the new scotch32 package provides a 32-bit version for applications that need it.
• BLIS has been added. Since it does not support instruction set selection at run-time yet, we created several packages specialized for each ISA extension: blis-haswell is the variant optimized for Haswell CPUs, blis-knl is the KNL variant, and so on. This is simplified by the implementation of a high-level make-blis function that returns specialized packages.

As far as numerical simulation is concerned:

• The OpenFOAM C++ computational fluid dynamics package was contributed by Paul Garlick of Tourbillion Technology.

There’s been a lot of activity in bioinformatics, leading to a total of almost 300 bioinformatics packages, notably with the addition of the following packages:

• f-seq;
• GEMMA;
• GESS;
• Kallisto;
• kentutils;
• Ritornello;
• many, many R packages (428 R package are available today).

Changes to core Guix relevant to HPC include:

• guix-daemon gained the --listen command-line option that we covered recently, and which is handy when installing Guix cluster-wide.
• The new guix import json command provides a smooth way for newcomers to get started writing new package definitions.
• aarch64 portability fixes were contributed by Eric Bavier of Cray, Inc.

Enjoy the new release!