A New Pulse for SLEEF
The SLEEF project provides open-source vectorized elementary math routines across widely used computer architectures and associated vector extensions. Its latest release came out this month along with updated documentation and contribution guidelines. This post inaugurates a new blog section on the project’s website.
Towards Fairer Contributions to SLEEF
At the end of 2023, after a long period of uncertainty for SLEEF, as discussed on #442, the SLEEF project has been revitalized with many contributions being accepted and three releases made. Like many open-source projects, SLEEF relies on the contributions of the community and the availability of maintainers. Without support (be it financial or in kind) from the main actors that benefit from these projects, there is a high chance for such projects to fall dormant again in the future.
Nearly a year ago Shibata-san, the project owner, came to an agreement with Arm®, and temporarily handed over the global maintainer role to a team of software engineers at Arm, see discussion #472. After identifying critical pending issues and pull-requests (PRs), in what came to be a long backlog overhaul, the newly accredited maintainers focused on revamping Continuous Integration (CI) and triaging issues and PRs. The team received outstanding contributions from the community for extending support to new architectures (#477), improving the build system (#531) and CI testing (#476), as well as supporting on macOS and Windows, see PRs #540 and #543. A first release in almost 3 years came out of this joint effort, namely SLEEF 3.6, followed by a substantial patch release, SLEEF 3.6.1.
Contributions/Commits over time, as shown on the GitHub Insights.
A Community-Driven Revival
Community contributions have been central to the recent revival of SLEEF. As maintainers, our task was to motivate and facilitate direct contributions from the community and make sure they serve the community’s broader interests.
To keep maintenance as low-cost and future proof as possible, it was agreed to rely on GitHub’s functionalities, such as GitHub Actions for CI testing. With help from the community, we are now nearly matching the level of testing prior to 2020, while supporting more widely used and reproducible build environments as provided by GitHub-hosted runners.
We are grateful for the contributions from communities based around the many architectures SLEEF now supports, including IBM® S/390 and PowerPC, Intel® x86, RISC-V, and Arm architectures.
Sample of the table/matrix of supported environment, reporting the status of GHA-based post-commit pipeline on multiple OS-es, and support level for individual vector extensions.
A New Regular Release Schedule
The growing engagement on the repository is a good indicator of the community’s attachment to the project and its appetite for the SLEEF project maintenance and development. By demand of many users, SLEEF is now on a regular release schedule (a minor release every 6 months), which is particularly helpful to large open-source projects that rely on SLEEF such as PyTorch, e.g. #131642 and #134672, Spack, e.g. #45431, or Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora.
The latest release of SLEEF paves the way to a community-maintained open-source project by providing crucial community standards such as issues and PR templates, as well as clear Contribution Guidelines. On top of this, the latest released version does facilitate maintenance of documentation by making it more accessible and easier to contribute to (via markdown), not to mention improved navigation and rendering on both GitHub UI and sleef.org.
What to Expect Next?
To stay on top of new compilers and OS-es, a lot of the maintainers time is spent on testing infrastructure and bug fixes. This increasing demand means increasing firefighting pressure, which could mean less time available for developing new features. However, keeping the community’s engagement high is key to a healthy open-source project. We also believe that investing in efficient maintenance will make new feature integration more seamless in the future.
Benchmarking and testing engines are currently being reworked with maintenance cost and portability in mind. We expect to make more machines and platforms available in CI via self-hosted runners, and we plan to add further security checks in CI. By popular demand, CPU detection is another aspect that we are looking to spend time on soon.
As always SLEEF is open to contributions, so please visit our Contribution Guidelines to find ways to contribute. If you would like to request a feature or fix a bug, the community can assist you in achieving this.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank the community for its continuous support in delivering a high-quality open-source project that works across platforms, their precious feedback and contributions have been central to the recent revival of the project and will be as essential for the future of SLEEF.