LAMMPS CI at Temple University Returns

The CI testing cluster for LAMMPS at Temple University is finally back! Sponsored and operated by the Institute of Computational Molecular Science, this cluster provides some much needed testing capacity to the LAMMPS projects as access to testing through GitHub Actions became increasingly limited. This problem was made worse by the significant number of additional ports of styles to the GPU, KOKKOS, and OPENMP packages.

While most of the equipment is quite old, it offers far more capability and capacity than the GitHub runners. There are 10 machines including one with 4 Nvidia V100 GPUs and a total of 30 workers. Those workers include 4 virtual machines with macOS 12, macOS 26, Windows 11 Home, and FreeBSD and use mostly only SSDs. Part of the hardware is used during the night to run static code analysis, benchmarks to identify performance regressions, and binary packages, similar to those attached to a LAMMPS release.

The additional capacity and capability lets us run more different test configuration and has already helped to identify and correct multiple bugs in LAMMPS. A card with the CI usage summary has also been added to the LAMMPS Testing Dashboard.