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?).

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.

Slides: eResearchBoFSpack.pdf (747.4 KB)

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.

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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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