Tutorial: Spack 101

This was the 3-hour introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was presented as a tutorial at Supercomputing 2016. We will be running through a modified version of this tutorial meant for NERSC.

Slides

Download Slides.

Full citation: Todd Gamblin, Massimiliano Culpo, Gregory Becker, Matt Legendre, Greg Lee, Elizabeth Fischer, and Benedikt Hegner. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. Tutorial presented at Supercomputing 2016. November 13, 2016, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.

Live Demos

These scripts will take you step-by-step through basic Spack tasks. They correspond to sections in the slides above.

1. Basic Installation Tutorial
2. Package Creation Tutorial
3. Module Configuration Tutorial
4. feature-overview

Full contents:

• Basic Installation Tutorial
  • Installing Spack
  • What is in Spack?
  • Installing Packages
  • Uninstalling Packages
  • Advanced spack find Usage
  • Customizing Compilers
  • Linking External Packages
  • Preferred Concretization
  • Choosing Targets
• Package Creation Tutorial
  • Getting Started
  • Creating the Package File
  • Package Documentation
  • Dependencies
  • Debugging Package Builds
  • Specifying Configure Arguments
  • Variants
  • The Spec Object
• Module Configuration Tutorial
  • Prerequisites
    • Fake install gcc-6.2.0
    • Build software that will be used in the tutorial
  • Filter unwanted modifications to the environment
  • Prevent some module files from being generated
  • Add custom environment modifications
  • Autoload dependencies
  • Lua hierarchical module files
    • Core/Compiler/MPI
    • Extend the hierarchy to other virtual providers
• Feature Overview
  • Scope
  • Example
  • Config.yaml
    • Customizing Builds
  • Preferred Concretization