[bartgol]

Add bfb variants of the gnu and intel jobs to the homme testing workflow (to compare the cxx and f90 builds against each other), raise the ctest timeout per test, and stop dumping the ctest logs on failure.

[BFB]

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Summary

This PR has five commits (the first stacked PR, #8952, and the follow-up #8997 are already merged):

1. Homme: allow to skip the comparison against baselines: add the HOMME_SKIP_BASELINE_COMPARE cmake option (OFF by default). If ON, the test scripts do not compare the output against baselines with cprnc, and do not check that the baseline files exist. Add --no-baseline to test_homme.py to set it (via NO_BASELINE in ctest_script.cmake). It cannot be used together with --generate. Behavior is unchanged when the option is not used.
2. Homme: add bfb machine files for the ghci CI runners: add ghci-gnu-bfb and ghci-intel-bfb, which turn on HOMMEXX_BFB_TESTING with strict fp (and no fma) flags, and then include the regular file.
3. Workflows: add bfb jobs to the homme testing workflow: add the bfb axis to the workflow matrix (gnu and intel; a cuda bfb job is left as a TODO, since it needs a baseline from the cpu bfb build). bfb jobs run with --bfb --no-baseline, so they do not need blessed baselines.
4. Workflows: raise the ctest timeout per test in the homme testing workflow: pass --timeout 1800 to ctest (Homme's own per-test limit, HOMME_TESTING_TIMELIMIT in ghci.cmake). ctest kills a test after 10 minutes by default, and the runners' hosts are shared (e.g., other users running builds): in one gnu job baro2b took 556s instead of 265s and baro2d was killed at 600s. The value is passed as --ctest-arg="--timeout 1800", with a space, since ctest silently ignores --timeout=1800.
5. Homme: stop dumping the ctest log files on failure: remove dump_last_ctest_log from test_homme.py and the "Show stderr/stdout of failed tests" step from the workflow. With -V --output-on-failure the progress and the output of failing tests are already in the job log, and the logs (Testing/**) and .err files are uploaded as an artifact. The workflow step also did not work in generate mode. When ctest fails, test_homme.py now prints the directory with the logs.

Status / notes

• In an earlier run (when this was part of Workflows: add homme standalone testing on ghci runners #8952), intel-bfb passed, including the *_cxx_vs_f90 comparisons. In the latest full run, intel-bfb and intel passed too.
• The gnu job of that run failed only because of the timeout above (baro2d killed at 600s); gnu-bfb and cuda had not run yet.
• Configure and build failures now show only the exit code in the job log (with -V, ctest prints progress dots for them); the error text is in Testing/Temporary/LastConfigure*.log and LastBuild*.log in the uploaded artifact.

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Generated by Claude Code

[Copilot]

🟡 Changes recommended

Test-launch failures can be hidden when baseline comparisons are disabled, while baseline-generation jobs fail, valid CMake boolean values are mishandled, and stdout diagnostics are lost.

4 open issues

• Generated script masks failures from earlier test launches · New
• BFB baseline generation passes incompatible flags · New
• Test artifacts omit model stdout diagnostics · New
• Baseline comparison flag rejects valid CMake boolean values · New

What changed in this PR

Extend HOMME’s standalone CI with GNU and Intel bit-for-bit comparisons
between C++ and Fortran builds, without requiring blessed baselines.

Changes:

• Add optional baseline skipping across Python, CMake, and shell scripts.
• Add CPU BFB configurations and workflow jobs.
• Raise the CTest timeout to 1,800 seconds and replace log dumps with a
  log-directory message while retaining artifact uploads.

File	Description
components/​homme/​utils/​test_homme.py	Add --no-baseline and simplify failure reporting.
components/​homme/​test/​reg_test/​run_tests/​testing-utils.sh	Skip baseline comparisons and existence checks when requested.
components/​homme/​test/​reg_test/​run_tests/​cmake_variables.sh	Expose the baseline-skip setting to shell scripts.
components/​homme/​test_execs/​CMakeLists.txt	Declare the baseline-skip CMake option.
components/​homme/​cmake/​machineFiles/​ghci-intel-bfb.cmake	Add strict floating-point settings for Intel BFB testing.
components/​homme/​cmake/​machineFiles/​ghci-gnu-bfb.cmake	Add GNU BFB settings with optimizations and FMA disabled.
components/​homme/​cmake/​ctest_script.cmake	Forward baseline skipping and reject incompatible generation.
.github/​workflows/​homme-testing.yml	Add BFB jobs, extend timeouts, and remove failure-log dumps.

_{Review effort: Balanced}