Tests fail when compiling using nvc++ for grace-hopper target hardware

[JPRichings]

Built with warnings but errored when tests run on grace-hopper node with cuda13.

Issue not present with same set-up when CXX compiler switched to g++.

Error messages in attached log file

LOG.txt

[otbrown]

Thanks James. As discussed: not urgent, but when we get a bit of time we should try and dig into why QuEST doesn't work with the NV compilers. Then we can take a decision on either a) fixing, or b) just documenting the workaround.

For anyone experiencing this issue and finding this:
Please use another compiler for the non-CUDA parts of QuEST by setting CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER and CMAKE_C_COMPILER appropriately at configure time, i.e. -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++ -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=gcc.

[TysonRayJones]

That Catch2 log is bizarre; it shows QuEST errors are being (deliberately) thrown exactly where expected, inside REQUIRE_THROWS_WITH. It is as if Catch2's REQUIRE_THROWS_WITH macro is failing to intercept the exception, perhaps because it has been expanded incorrectly by the NV compiler. I didn't find any hits online about it, and I can see Catch2 does contain some NVCC provisions, like here.

I tried to investigate by compiling all QuEST src using nvcc v12.8, v12.9 and v13.0 but they don't recognise some flags passed by the cmake build. Happy to probe further if you can provide me more info about the setup!

As a workaround, assuming the issue really is about REQUIRE_THROWS_WITH, you can skip all test sections which use that macro (all "validation" sections) by instead only running the "correctness" tests (the only other kind) via:

testexec -c "correctness"