Tutorial: Spack 101

This is a full-day introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented at Supercomputing 2021 on November 14, 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

Slide Preview

Download Slides.

Full citation: Gregory Becker, Robert Blake, Massimiliano Culpo, Tamara Dahlgren Adam Stewart, Peter Scheibel, Harmen Stoppels, and Todd Gamblin. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. Tutorial presented at Supercomputing 2021 (SC’21). November 14, 2021. St. Louis, MO, USA.

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