Tutorial: Spack 101

This is an introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented at the Supercomputing 2024 Conference, November 18, 2024. 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

Slide Preview

Download Slides.

Full citation: Todd Gamblin, Gregory Becker, Alec Scott, Phil Sakievich, and Luke Peyralans. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. Supercomputing 2024 (SC24), Atlanta, GA, November 18, 2024.

Video

For the last recorded video of this tutorial, see the HPCIC Tutorial 2024 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:sc24
$ docker run -it ghcr.io/spack/tutorial:sc24

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:

Tutorial