Improve partitioner unit tests

[mike-hobson]

PR Summary

Sci/Tech Reviewer: None required
Code Reviewer: @stevemullerworth

I noted three deficiencies with the partition unit tests:

1. There are no tests of uneven partitions. The single panel partitioner unit tests use an 8x8 full domain mesh. If this is partitioned over 3 ranks, it should result in partitions of size 3x8, 3x8 and 2x8 (i.e. uneven). Add such tests to the biperiodic, planar and x- plus y- trench mesh partitioner tests.
2. There is no test of the parallel cubedsphere partitioner. This was omitted because it is slow to run from the command line. Whilst that is true (it is slower than all the other infrastructure unit tests combined), this is the partitioner used for almost all global model runs - so I have added it in (and we'll take the hit on runtime).
3. The current test suite runs the unit tests on one core - even though the infrastructure unit tests are parallel. The infrastructure unit tests take two and a half minutes to complete. Giving them the correct number of cores to run on drops this to 8 seconds. There is no fine-grained control of resources for the unit tests, so after discussions with SSD, we decided it was fine for all "technical tests" (integration- and unit-tests) to run on multiple cores. The Met Office appears to have its own overrides for this setting, but I have also changed the system default (as I can see no reason for anyone wanting to run a parallel test on a single core)

Code Quality Checklist

• I have performed a self-review of my own code
• My code follows the project's style guidelines
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Testing

• I have tested this change locally, using the LFRic Core rose-stem suite
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Test Suite Results - lfric_core - partition_test/run1

Suite Information

Item	Value
Suite Name	partition_test/run1
Suite User	mike.hobson
Workflow Start	2026-01-29T06:08:00
Groups Run	all

Dependency	Reference	Main Like
lfric_core	mike-hobson/lfric_core@add_uneven_partition_test	False
SimSys_Scripts	MetOffice/[email protected]	True

Task Information

✅ succeeded tasks - 372

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Documentation

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Code Review

• All dependencies have been resolved
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[james-bruten-mo]

rose-stem all good

[stevemullerworth]

Testing the branch infrastructure unit tests on the command line makes sense, and code looks OK. On merging on main, I get a failure with run_lfric_xios_integration_tests_azspice_gnu_64bit: the job.out looks fine, but the job.err reports an "unexpected error"

[MatthewHambley]

Presumed build system code owner's review. This looks fine, bumping the number of processes for the mpiexec is not a problem. I've made a drive-by comment on something else for the actual reviewers to consider.

[MatthewHambley]

I appreciate that you're following the existing pattern, but if each of these tests are so different they may, in fact, be three different tests with different number of MPI processes. Rather than one run three times.