Official documentation of SPACK

Having worked with spack environments for some time, we have encountered several severe issues which have convinced us that we need to find a more practical way of maintaining software packages at VSC.

There are now three separate spack installation trees corresponding to the CPU/GPU architectures on VSC:

• skylake - Intel CPUs; works on Intel Skylake and Cascadelake CPUs
• zen - AMD CPUs; works on Zen 2 and 3 CPUs
• cuda-zen - AMD CPUs + NVIDIA GPUs; works on all nodes equipped with graphics cards

By default the spack installation tree suitable for the current compute/login node is activated and will be indicated by a prefix on the command line, e.g.:

zen [user@l51 ~]$

Read more at:

Transition to new SPACK without Environments

Most software on VSC4/5 is installed via spack, to list available software packages use:

spack find

List all available packages compiled with a specific compiler:

spack find %gcc@9.1.0

A specific version can be requested as well:

spack find openmpi@4.1.0

List a specific version compiled with a specific compiler:

spack find openmpi@4.1.0%gcc@9.1.0

The detail level of information can be specified with the following options:

spack find -l openmpi@4.1.0%gcc@9.1.0
spack find -lv openmpi@4.1.0%gcc@9.1.0
spack find -lvd openmpi@4.1.0%gcc@9.1.0

The latter lists all dependencies of the package.

Dependencies: dependencies of software packages can be specified with a ^. e.g.:

spack find -lvd py-scipy %intel@19.0.5.281 ^python@3.7.4 ^intel-mkl

This will list all available versions of py-scipy which have been build with python@3.7.4 and any version of intel-mkl.

List all currently loaded packages:

spack find --loaded

The spack command can be used to load software modules. The general form is:

spack load <package>

package has to be a uniquely defined software package where all dependencies have been resolved, e.g.:

spack load openmpi@4.1.0%gcc@9.1.0

This will load the corresponding module:

# module list
Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
 1) openmpi/4.1.0-gcc-9.1.0-2cmze2s

and is equivalent to loading the module as:

module load openmpi/4.1.0-gcc-9.1.0-2cmze2s

Alternatively a package can be loaded by using the unique hash of a package. The option -l will display the short hash of a package:

# spack find -l openmpi@4.1.0%gcc@9.1.0
==> 1 installed package
-- linux-centos7-x86_64 / gcc@9.1.0 -----------------------------
2cmze2s openmpi@4.1.0

The hash 2cmze2s uniquely identifies the package and can also be used to load the software module:

spack load /2cmze2s

Unload all currently loaded packages:

spack unload --all