In this video from the MVAPICH User Group, Greg Becker from LLNL presents: Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack.
Spack is an open-source package manager for HPC. Its simple, templated Python DSL allows the same package to be built in many configurations, with different compilers, flags, dependencies, and dependency versions. Spack allows HPC end users to automatically build any of over 3,000 community-maintained packages, and it enables software developers to easily manage large applications with hundreds of dependencies. These capabilities also enable Spack to greatly simplify HPC container builds. This presentation will give an overview of Spack, including recent developments and a number of items on the near-term roadmap. We will focus on Spack features relevant to the MVAPICH community; these include Spack’s virtual package abstraction, which is used for API-compatible libraries including MPI implementations, package level compiler wrappers, and packages which modify other package’s build environments. We will also touch on Spack workflows and how invidivuals and teams can accelerate their software deployment with Spack.
Gregory Becker is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His focus is on bridging the gap between research and production software at LLNL. His work in software productization has led him to work on Spack, a package manager for high performance computing, as well scalable I/O formats for performance tools. Gregory has been at LLNL since 2015. He received his B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Williams College in 2015.
