NCCL Issue Cleanup

[mnicely]

NCCL Community,

We’re excited to announce a new initiative to make our GitHub repository more responsive and focused on the issues that matter most to our active community. As part of our commitment to fostering better engagement and providing timely support, we’re implementing a 6-month issue cleanup policy.

What’s Changing?

Starting immediately, we’ll be closing issues that haven’t seen activity in over 6 months. This proactive approach will help us:

• Focus our engineering efforts on current, active challenges facing NCCL users
• Improve response times for new and ongoing issues
• Reduce noise in our issue tracker to make it easier to find relevant discussions
• Encourage fresh reporting with the latest NCCL versions and updated system configurations

Our Commitment to You

This change reflects our dedication to being more active on GitHub and providing better support to our community. We want to ensure that every issue receives the attention it deserves, and that our limited engineering resources are directed toward the problems you’re actively encountering.

Key points about this policy:

• Issues over 6 months old without recent activity will be automatically closed
• You can always reopen a closed issue if it’s still relevant - just add a quick comment like “Still relevant on NCCL version X”
• This helps us focus on issues that affect current NCCL versions (we’re now at 2.27.5!)
• Fresh issue reports often contain better diagnostic information and current system details

How This Benefits Our Community

Based on our analysis of successful open source projects, this approach will enable us to:

1. Respond faster to active issues and feature requests
2. Maintain better issue quality with current version information
3. Reduce duplicate reports by encouraging users to search recent issues first
4. Improve our triage process with a cleaner, more manageable issue backlog

The Technical Context

NCCL has evolved significantly over recent releases. With 18 months of improvements between older versions like 2.17 and our current 2.27.5 release, many historical issues may already be resolved. Our cleanup ensures we’re focusing on problems that exist in supported versions.

What This Means for You

• No action needed for issues with recent activity
• Closed issues remain searchable and can be referenced for context
• Easy to reopen if you’re still experiencing the problem
• Encourages reporting with current NCCL versions and fresh diagnostics

Moving Forward Together
This initiative is part of our broader commitment to community engagement and responsive support. We’re also expanding our use of GitHub Discussions for broader conversations, roadmap planning, and community announcements.

We encourage you to:

• ✅ Report issues with current NCCL versions for faster resolution
• ✅ Use GitHub Discussions for questions, feature requests, and community conversations
• ✅ Check our latest releases - many issues are resolved in newer versions
• ✅ Reopen closed issues if they’re still relevant to your current setup

Questions?
If you have questions about this policy or need help with NCCL, please:

• Start a discussion in our GitHub Discussions section
• Open a new issue for bugs or problems with current versions
• Check our documentation at https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/nccl/

Thank you for being part of the NCCL community. Together, we’re building better collective communication primitives for GPU computing, and this change helps us serve you more effectively.

The NCCL Team

This announcement is part of our commitment to maintaining an active, responsive open source community. We appreciate your understanding and continued contributions to NCCL.