Tutorial: Spack 101
This is an introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented at the Supercomputing 2023 Conference, November 12, 2023. The event was a full-day tutorial.
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

Full citation: Todd Gamblin, Gregory Becker, Richarda Butler, Massimiliano Culpo, Tamara Dahlgren, Adam Stewart, Luke Peyralans, and Alec Scott. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. Supercomputing 2023 (SC23), Denver, CO. November 12 2023.
Video
For the last video of this tutorial, see the AWS/RADIUSS 2023 version
Live Demos
We provide scripts that take you step-by-step through basic Spack tasks. They correspond to sections in the slides above.
To run through the scripts, we provide the spack/tutorial container image. You can invoke
$ docker pull ghcr.io/spack/tutorial:sc23
$ docker run -it ghcr.io/spack/tutorial:sc23
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
- Basic Installation Tutorial
- Environments Tutorial
- Configuration Tutorial
- Package Creation Tutorial
- Mirrors and Binary Caches Tutorial
- Stacks Tutorial
- Developer Workflows Tutorial
- Scripting with Spack
- Module Files Tutorial
- Spack Package Build Systems
- Advanced Topics in Packaging