Support of the IBM Power9 (ppc64le) architecture

[raimis]

• I read the conda-forge documentation and could not find the solution for my problem there.

Is any plan to support the IBM Power9 (ppc64le) architecture? It was reported that the code compiles and pass the majority of the tests: plumed/plumed2#569

OpenMM has just been ported to ppc64le (conda-forge/openmm-feedstock#55), so it would be good to have PLUMED too.

[awvwgk]

Currently waiting for conda-forge/vim-feedstock#1224 to get merged, since vim is a build requirement.

See: https://conda-forge.org/status/#aarch64andppc64leaddition

[GiovanniBussi]

@raimis @awvwgk I actually made a change on plumed master branch so that vim won't be anymore a build requirement. It will be included in plumed v2.8.

It's actually a single commit that could be backported. If there's any volunteer to create a patch for the conda build (I don't know how to do it), so that this commit is applied on v2.7 before building it, I would be happy to merge it in the feedstock. Otherwise I would wait for vim to get merged.

[awvwgk]

You can just add the patch to the recipe directory (https://github.com/plumed/plumed2/commit/e84a4aee8a997952866303b080d5f50058645593.patch as new file) and apply it to the downloaded source in the recipe/meta.yaml with:

source:
  url: https://github.com/plumed/plumed2/archive/v{{ version }}.tar.gz
  sha256: cb8b5735d8dd61980fa6441f3dde3f33544240ae4177da0f529fb5abb355cd4a
  patches:
    - remove-xxd-dep.patch

It is also quite straight-forward to add the architectures yourself in conda-forge.yml and rerender the feedstock without waiting for the bot to apply the migrator.

provider:
  linux_aarch64: default    
  linux_ppc64le: default

[raimis]

@GiovanniBussi @awvwgk thank you for such a quick solution!

[GiovanniBussi]

@raimis could you please confirm that the executable is working correctly? Thanks

[raimis]

I tried to install and check some CLI. So far so good. I'll be able to check it more rigorously when the OpenMM-PLUMED is working (conda-forge/openmm-plumed-feedstock#10).