Tutorial: Spack 101

This is a full-day introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented as a virtual event at the 2021 ECP Annual Meeting on April 16, 2021.

You can use these materials to teach a course on Spack at your own site, or you can just skip ahead and read the live demo scripts to see how Spack is used in practice.

Slides

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Full citation: Gregory Becker, Robert Blake, Tamara Dahlgren, Peter Scheibel, Todd Gamblin. Using Spack to Accelerate Developer Workflows ECP Annual Meeting 2021. Virtual event. April 16, 2021.

Video

Live Demos

We provide scripts that take you step-by-step through basic Spack tasks. They correspond to sections in the slides above. You can use one of the following methods to run through the scripts:

  1. We provide the spack/tutorial container image on Docker Hub that you can use to do the tutorial on your local machine. You can invoke docker run -it spack/tutorial to start using the container.

  2. When we host the tutorial, we also provision VM instances in AWS, so that users who are unfamiliar with Docker can simply log into a VPM to do the demo exercises.

You should now be ready to run through our demo scripts:

Older sections of the tutorial are also available, although they may not be kept up-to-date as frequently:

Full contents:

Tutorial