Tutorial: Spack 101

This is an introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented as a virtual event at ISC-HPC 2022 on May 29, 2022. The ISC event was a half-day tutorial, but there is a full day of material here.

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, Michael Kuhn, and Harmen Stoppels. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. ISC-HPC 2022. Hamburg, Germany. May 29, 2022.

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

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

Other sections from past tutorials are also available, although they may not be kept up-to-date as frequently:

Full contents:

Links

Tutorial