Birds of a Feather

Spack Community BoF

Authors: Gregory Becker (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Todd Gamblin (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Massimiliano Culpo (np-complete, S.r.l. a socio unico), Harmen Stoppels (Stoppels Consulting), Tamara Dahlgren (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Phil Sakievich (Sandia National Laboratories)

Abstract: Spack is a package manager for scientific computing, with a rapidly growing open-source community. Spack has over 1000 contributors from academia, industry, and laboratories across the world, and is used to manage software releases for the U.S. Exascale Computing Project. Spack developers will give updates on the community, new features, and the roadmap for future development. We will poll the audience to gather valuable information on how Spack is being used, and we will open the floor for questions. All are invited to provide feedback, request features, and discuss future directions. Help us make installing HPC software simple!

Long Description: HPC software is becoming increasingly complex. The largest applications require hundreds of dependency libraries, and they combine interpreted languages like Python with C, C++, and Fortran libraries. To achieve good performance, developers tune for multiple compilers, build options, and implementations of dependency libraries like MPI, BLAS, and LAPACK. The space of possible build configurations is combinatorial, and developers waste countless hours rebuilding software instead of producing new scientific results.

Spack (https://spack.io) is a package manager for scientific computing. It aims to reduce the complexity of building and installing HPC software on laptops, clusters, and the most powerful supercomputers in the world. There are over 7,000 package recipes in the Spack mainline repository, and over 5,000 users visit the Spack documentation monthly. Spack has a rapidly growing open source community from across the world, with over 1000 contributors from academia, industry, and laboratories. End users install complex HPC applications; developers manage dependencies for themselves and for their team; and the largest supercomputing sites in the world use Spack to deploy software for thousands of users. Spack is also being used to manage software releases for the U.S. Exascale Computing Project.

The goals of this BOF are: 1) to inform users about recent and upcoming developments, 2) to connect sites and developers using Spack to manage software, 3) to solicit feedback to guide future directions, and 4) to build the Spack community.

Since we originally presented Spack at SC15, the community has grown very rapidly, and new features are being added at a rapid pace. SC is a great venue to keep the user community informed about the most important new developments, and to ensure Spack core developers understand the evolving needs of the user base.

The Spack Community BOF has been held at every SC conference since SC18, with regular attendance of 90-110 people. We have held Spack tutorials at every SC since 2016, and regularly have 40-60 attendees. At SC22, the Spack Community BoF had over 90 attendees and the tutorial had over 40. BoF sessions at other conferences such as PEARC (75 attendees) and ISC (100 attendees) are also well attended. While the Spack Community's virtual communication channels are well-utilized, users and contributors have asked for public fora for announcements, feedback, and community building; an SC BoF is an ideal venue for these interactions.

Website: https://spack.io/