Binary Packaging for HPC with Spack

In this video from FOSDEM 2018 in Brussels, Todd Gamblin presents: Binary Packaging for HPC with Spack.

Spack is a package manager for cluster users, developers, and administrators, rapidly gaining populartiy in the HPC community. Like other HPC package managers, Spack was designed to build packages from source. However, we’ve recently added binary packaging capabilities, which pose unique challenges for HPC environments. Most binary distributions assume a lowest-common-denominator architecture, e.g. x86_64, and do not take advantage of vector instructions or architecture-specific features. Spack supports relocatable binaries for specific OS releases, target architectures, MPI implementations, and other very fine-grained build options.

This talk will introduce binary packaging in Spack and some of the open infrastructure we have planned for distributing packages. We’ll talk about challenges to providing binaries for a combinatorially large package ecosystem, and what we’re doing in Spack to address these problems. We’ll also talk about challenges for implementing relocatable binaries with a multi-compiler system like Spack. Finally, We’ll talk about how Spack integrates with the US exsascale project’s open source software release plan, and how this will help glue together the HPC OSS ecosystem as a whole.

Todd Gamblin is a computer scientist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research focuses on tools for parallel performance analysis. He is also the creator of Spack, an HPC package management tool.

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