How to Spack a software package

Brendan Bouffler
Date : August 26, 2021
Categories : AWS ParallelCluster ,Amazon NICE DCV ,Life Sciences
Tags : cpus ,covid 19 ,dcv ,ec2 ,gpus ,hpc ,high performance computing ,lustre ,parallel cluster ,schedulers ,storage ,arm ,dependencies ,graviton ,graviton2 ,porting ,processors ,spack ,tuning ,virtualization ,vizualization ,techshorts

This is a talk that was delivered at the AWS/Arm Cloud Hackathon in July 2021.

Todd Gamblin (the creator of Spack) and his colleague Greg Becker talk us through the essential skills and concepts needed to understand how to create and deploy Spack recipes to build scientific codes. Spack massively simplifies the task of building scientific applications, which are almost defined by their insane build methods and dependency hierarchies. We made extensive use of Spack in the hackathon, and were extremely grateful for their help.

The Summer Hackathon ran for a week from July 12-16 in 2021. It’s purpose was to assemble the HPC community around a common goal of beginning the porting/testing/tuning process for dozens of codes to use Arm-based processors, in this case, AWS’s Graviton2’s.

During the week we had a series of talks from global leaders and experts in various fields from compilers to networking, profiling debugging and tooling. We’ve published all the talks here in the HPC Tech Shorts channel, in the hope that everyone gets some value from them.

If you want to join in our collective effort to boost the performance of HPC workloads on Arm, DM us at Twitter (@TechHpc) or head to a-hug.org/ and join the community.