Building a spack community in Australia

Technical spack
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TL;DR

We want to grow a community of spack users in Australia.

Introduction

ACCESS-NRI (@harshula, @Aidan, @TommyGatti, @paulleopardi) is using spack heavily in climate model build, test and deployment infrastructure.

We’re collaborating with NCI (@rui.yang @yxs900) and the Bureau of Meteorology (@Scott) who are also utilising spack for their own needs.

This has been a fruitful collaboration because spack is such a versatile and powerful tool, each of us is using it in different ways, but we can effectively share the configurations, packages and tooling.

We would like to expand this collaboration into the wider Australian research community (and beyond?).

eResearch 2025

We have a shared Birds of a Feather session at eResearch 2025 to try and connect and collaborate with a wider community.

If you’re interested in building scientific software, particularly but not exclusively on HPC, then please come to our session in the Element Room.

Do you build and deploy complex customised software at HPC centres? Are you a researcher that develops and builds software with complex dependencies that may need to be run at multiple HPC centres? What do Amazon, AMD, CERN, Fermilab, Google, INTEL, LLNL, Microsoft, NOAA, NVIDIA, Riken have in common with ACCESS-NRI, the Bureau of Meteorology and Pawsey?

The answer is Spack! A leading international Spack expert and core-developer, Greg Becker, will describe the Spack 1.0 release, its benefits for users, strategies for seamlessly upgrading to Spack 1.0 and upcoming features. This will be followed by a discussion to elicit feedback from the community.

Additionally, we will discuss the successful community engagement practices undertaken by the Spack project to facilitate and support ACCESS-NRI and Pawsey to meet their objectives.

Slide: Final Slide.pdf (188.4 KB)

2024 BoF details

Birds of a Feather @ eResearch 2024

We have a shared Birds of a Feather session at eResearch 2024 to try and connect and collaborate with a wider community.

If you’re interested in building scientific software, particularly but not exclusively on HPC, then please come to our session in the Element Room.

Follow up

If you came to the BoF and are interested in persuing it more, or if you can’t make it but are interested in collaborating please reply in this topic and we can start to organise some information sharing.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Self-referential QR code

To show others on a smartphone so they can find this post.

spack_community_qr
spack_community_qr2085×2095 97.4 KB

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EPILOGUE

Slide 13 contains an example from a Spack Package Recipe with the snippet:

self.define("CMAKE_C_COMPILER", self.spec["mpi"].mpicc),
self.define("CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER", self.spec["mpi"].mpicxx),
self.define("CMAKE_Fortran_COMPILER", self.spec["mpi"].mpifc)

This was added to workaround Gadi’s openmpi directory layout. It is not required, on Gadi, if Spack’s packages.yaml configuration file contains:

    - spec: openmpi@4.1.5 %intel
      prefix: /apps/openmpi/4.1.5
      modules: [openmpi/4.1.5]
      extra_attributes:
        environment:
          prepend_path:
            CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH: /apps/openmpi/4.1.5/include/Intel
    buildable: false
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Good news! Spack upstream have set a meeting during Australian business hours (AEDT 11:30am-12:30pm on Wednesday):

It was great to meet at eResearch 2024, see you all at the Spack meeting!

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Pinned today in the Spack Slack channel

@everyone we will be having a general meeting on Tuesday December 3rd at 4:30pm PT (UTC-8) - AKA 11:30am Wednesday in AEDT.

This is for Q&A, and is intended to be convenient for folks in the AEDT timezone

Meeting notes: Telcon: 2024 12 03 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub

Meeting access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/L4P1Jt51YFY

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Pinned today in the Spack slack channel

we will be having a general meeting on January 7th at 4:30pm PT (UTC-8) - AKA 11:30am Wednesday in AEDT.

This is for Q&A, and is intended to be convenient for folks in the AEDT timezone

Meeting notes: Telcon: 2025 01 07 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub

Meeting access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/xRvwPKOyUlc

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Pinned today in the Spack slack channel

[W]e will be having a general meeting on February 4th at 4:30pm PT (UTC-8) - AKA 11:30am Wednesday February 5th in AEDT.
This is for Q&A, and is intended to be convenient for folks in the AEDT timezone
Meeting notes: Telcon: 2025 02 04 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub
Meeting access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/IhiSjTyOcuY

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Pinned today in the Spack slack channel

[W]e will be having a general meeting on Tuesday March 4th at 4:30pm PT (UTC-8) - AKA 11:30am Wednesday March 5th in AEDT.
This is for Q&A, and is intended to be convenient for folks in the AEDT timezone

Meeting notes: Telcon: 2025 03 04 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub
Meeting access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/A2bgqcAAJdI

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Pinned today in the Spack slack channel

Hi all, we will be having a general meeting on Tuesday April 1st at 5:30pm PT (UTC-7) - AKA 11:30am Wednesday April 2nd in AEDT.

This is for Q&A, and is intended to be convenient for folks in the AEDT timezone
(this is occurring after USA DST but before Australia DST, so it is shifted one hour later in USA time compared to prior meetings)

Meeting notes: Telcon: 2025 04 01 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub
Meeting access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/U_AANm1P2RI

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Pinned in Spack slack channel

Hi all, the next general meetings will be on May 13th at 5pm PT (UTC-7): i.e. 10am May 14 in AEST (UTC+10) timezone:

Meeting notes: Telcon: 2025 05 13 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub
Meeting access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/ewfDgTXN0Zg

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Hi All,

There was a Spack User Meeting held in May, in Chicago, as part of High Performance Software Foundation conference:

The talks should appear on the HPSF Youtube channel:

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The Spack talks are now available on Youtube as a watch list:

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General meeting: June 3rd at 5pm PT (UTC-7): i.e. 10am June 4th in AEST (UTC+10) timezone:
Meeting access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/T7TVe1NFSZ8
Meeting notes: Telcon: 2025 06 03 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub

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General meeting: July 1st at 5pm PT (UTC-7): i.e. 10am July 2nd in AEST (UTC+10) timezone
Access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/xE6iQYSLPag
Notes: Telcon: 2025 07 01 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub

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General meeting: August 5th at 5pm PT (UTC-7): i.e. 10am August 6th in AEST (UTC+10) timezone:

Access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/kYPV-MaI3AA

Meeting notes (and agenda): https://github.com/spack/spack/wiki/Telcon:-2025-06-05

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General meeting: September 2nd at 5pm PT (UTC-7): i.e. 10am September 3rd in AEST (UTC+10) timezone:

Access: https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/7i6xL5awhSI
Notes: Telcon: 2025 09 02 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub

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General meeting: Tuesday October 7th, 5:00pm PT (UTC -7:00) - This is AEDT 11:00am-12:00pm (UTC +11:00) on Wednesday October 8th, intended to be convenient for folks in that timezone:
Access: LFX Meetings
Notes: Telcon: 2025 10 07 · spack/spack Wiki · GitHub