Tutorial: Spack 101

This is a full-day introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented at the International Supercomputing Conference on June 16, 2019. That instance was a half day tutorial, but the materials here include all the material you need for a full day.

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: Todd Gamblin, Gregory Becker, Massimiliano Culpo, and Michael Kuhn. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. Tutorial presented at International Supercomputing Conference (ISC‘19). June 16, 2019. Frankfurt, Germany.

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:

Full contents:

Contents