Spack – A Package Manager for HPC

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Todd Gamblin from LLNL

In this video from the 2019 Stanford HPC Conference, Todd Gamblin from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory presents: Spack – A Package Manager for HPC.

Spack is a package manager for cluster users, developers and administrators. Rapidly gaining popularity in the HPC community, like other HPC package managers, Spack was designed to build packages from source. Spack supports relocatable binaries for specific OS releases, target architectures, MPI implementations, and other very fine-grained build options. This talk will introduce some of the open infrastructure for distributing packages, challenges to providing binaries for a large package ecosystem and what we’re doing to address problems. We’ll also talk about challenges for implementing relocatable binaries with a multi-compiler system like Spack. Finally, we’ll talk about how Spack integrates with the US Exascale project’s open source software release plan and how this will help glue together the HPC OSS ecosystem.

Todd Gamblin is a computer scientist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research focuses on scalable tools for measuring, analyzing, and visualizing performance data from massively parallel applications. Todd is also involved with many production projects at LLNL. He works with Livermore Computing’s Development Environment Group to build tools that allow users to deploy, run, debug, and optimize their software for machines with million-way concurrency. Todd received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. His dissertation investigated parallel methods for compressing and sampling performance measurements from hundreds of thousands of concurrent processors. He received his B.A. in Computer Science and Japanese from Williams College in 2002. He has also worked as a software developer in Tokyo and held research internships at the University of Tokyo and IBM Research.

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