Spack: A package manager for HPC

Todd Gamblin Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Gamblin's Bio

Todd Gamblin is a Computer Scientist in the Advanced Technology Office in Livermore Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research focuses on scalable tools for measuring, analyzing, and visualizing parallel performance data. In addition to his research, Todd leads LLNL's DevRAMP (Reproducibility, Analysis, Monitoring, and Performance) team and the Software Packaging Technologies project in the U.S. Exascale Computing Project. He created Spack, an popular open source HPC package management tool with a community of over 400 contributors.

Todd has been at LLNL since 2008. He received the Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2014. He received Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009 and 2005, and his B.A. in Computer Science and Japanese from Williams College in 2002.

Abstract

Spack is an open-source package manager for HPC. Its simple, templated Python DSL allows the same package to be built in many configurations, with different compilers, flags, dependencies, and dependency versions. Spack allows HPC end users to automatically build any of over 3,000 community-maintained packages, software developers to easily manage large applications with hundreds of dependencies, and HPC facility administrators to deploy software stacks for all of their users.

This talk will give a technical overview of Spack, as well as a brief rundown of recent developments, the longer-term Spack road map, and activities within the U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP).

Session details

Webinar video