RCE 102: Spack

Spack is a package management tool designed to support multiple versions and configurations of software on a wide variety of platforms and environments. It was designed for large supercomputing centers, where many users and application teams share common installations of software on clusters with exotic architectures, using libraries that do not have a standard ABI. Spack is non-destructive: installing a new version does not break existing installations, so many configurations can coexist on the same system. https://github.com/scalability-llnl/spack

Todd is a computer scientist in the Center for Applied Scientific
Computing at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory . His research focuses on
scalable tools for measuring, analyzing, and visualizing performance the
performance of massively parallel simulations. Todd works closely with
production simulation teams at LLNL, and he likes to create tools that
users can pick up easily.

Frustrated with the complexity of building HPC performance tools, Todd
started developing Spack two years ago to allow users to painlessly
install software on big machines. Spack has since been adopted by
Livermore Computing, other HPC centers, and LLNL application teams. The
open source project now includes several core developers at LLNL and a
rapidly growing community on GitHub. A 1.0 release is coming soon.