SPACK#

SPACK is a package manager to install software packages. An advantage is to be able to relatively easily install consistent dependencies and multiple versions of a software. The following link contains a list of software that should be easy to install: SPACK package list

Modules#

SPACK makes use of the module system, to enable SPACK build modules use:

For gray and all nodes (optimized for Xeon E5-2630L Haswell CPUs will also run on green nodes, but will not use all hardware features):

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module load gray-spack

Optimized for green nodes (optimized for Xeon Gold 6148 Skylake CPUs may not run on gray nodes):

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module load green-spack

Optimized for amp (AMD EPYC 7742 Zen2), available only on amp:

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module load amp-spack

By default SPACK builds optimized for the CPU the software is build on. The packages from the gray nodes will work on the green nodes but slower than the optimized modules. Conversely, the skylake-optimized modules will try to use hardware features not present on the gray nodes, so the software will not run there.

You can autoactivate the correct module path in your .bashrc with a code block like this:

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if [[ $(hostname -s) = base ]]; then
  module load green-spack
elif [[ $(hostname -s) = green* ]]; then
  module load green-spack
elif  [[ $(hostname -s) = gray* ]]; then
  module load gray-spack
elif  [[ $(hostname -s) = amp ]]; then
  module load amp-spack
fi

User build software#

SPACK can also be used by users to manage their own software stack inside their home directory (be aware, this takes a lot of space!).

see documentation on https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

A similar tool is EasyBuild. They support different lists of software packages. SPACK includes GPU-offloading compiler for both Nvidia and AMD, profiling tools (Tau, HPCToolkit) and engineering simulation packages (ElmerFEM, OpenFOAM), while EasyBuild seems to be more AI and Python oriented https://docs.easybuild.io/version-specific/supported-software/.

SPACK is used by University of Tartu, LRZ and HLRS, while EasyBuild will be used on LUMI.