Spack

Spack is a package manager that simplifies installing and running customised scientific software stacks. With Spack, you can build a package with multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers, and all of these builds can coexist in parallel.

A shared library of common software has been preinstalled on the Research Cluster, available to use via a Shared read-only Spack instance or via environment modules.

Users wanting to install their own Spack packages should install and manage their own local Spack instance (See User-local Spack installation).

Shared read-only Spack

Note

All pre-installed Spack packages are also available by default via environment modules without needing to use Spack.

To initialise use of the read-only shared Spack instance, run:

. /opt/spack/spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh

(or equivalent setup-env script for non-default shells)

That will make the spack function available, and gives you read-only access to the shared library of pre-installed packages.

You could add this to your ~/.bashrc file (or its equivalent when not using the default bash shell and ~/.bash_profile) to automatically source the initialisation script the next time you open a terminal session:

echo '. /opt/spack/spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh' >> ~/.bashrc

User-local Spack installation

In order to install Spack packages youself, you need to set up your own Spack instance.

Open a terminal and with your $HOME as the current working directory, follow the Installation instructions on the Spack website and source the appropriate initialisation script:

cd && git clone -c feature.manyFiles=true --depth=2 https://github.com/spack/spack.git
. ~/spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh

The sourcing of setup-env may be added to your ~/.bashrc file (or its equivalent when not using the default bash shell and ~/.bash_profile) to automatically source the initialisation script the next time you open a terminal session:

echo '. ~/spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh' >> ~/.bashrc

We highly recommend chaining your user-local Spack to our shared Spack, so you can make use of and build upon the shared packages already available. In order to do so, you can run the following to create the upstreams configuration file ~/.spack/upstreams.yaml:

mkdir -p ~/.spack && cat <<EOF > ~/.spack/upstreams.yaml
upstreams:
  system-spack:
    install_tree: /opt/spack/spack/opt/spack
EOF

Following the above instructions, Spack packages will be installed under ~/spack/ in your home directory, which can get sizable and will count towards your home directory storage quota. If you have a /projects folder set up, Spack can alternatively be installed there or set up as an alternative prefix.
If you installed Spack via the recommended git clone, you can keep your local Spack instance up to date by running cd $SPACK_ROOT && git pull

Usage on the Research Cluster

Please refer to the Basic usage documentation on the Spack website for a comprehensive overview and examples of how to query, install, load and use packages and Spack environments.