stack-spack

This project contains bash scripts to setup a Spack-based software stack and find a suitable system compiler.

Useful information before beginning

Spack works only on Linux and MacOS platforms. Windows is not supported.

Before installing Spack, make sure your system supports Environment Modules package. It can be easily installed.

Ensure your system has the minimum Spack prerequisites.

Installation

$ ./install-spack.sh <stack_root>

where <stack_root> is root directory of the desired software stack. For example:

$ ./install-spack.sh ../stack-2019.03

Find a suitable system compiler that can install Spack packages

• In our limited experience, many system compilers fail for various reasons to install complex software stacks.

• On Linux systems, the approach that has been most consistent for us has been to build gcc-7.3.0 and binutils using a suitable system compiler. Then, we use the installed Spack gcc-7.3.0 to build the remaining software stack.

• One can use a system gcc-7.3.0 to build the Spack gcc-7.3.0. In fact, we had to do this very thing in the past in order to reliably build some ornery software stacks on our systems.

• On MacOS systems, one can build gcc-7.3.0 using a clang compiler, but gcc on a Mac does not play well with cmake and other packages. So, on MacOS, we recommend to stick with only clang compilers.

• Below is a typical work flow that selects gcc-7.3.0 as its final system compiler.

$ cd <stack_root>

$ source 1-setup-spack.sh
$ echo $SPACK_ROOT   # the output should be same as your current directory

$ ./scripts/compiler.sh add
$ ./scripts/compiler.sh avail

$ ./scripts/compiler.sh try [email protected]

$ module load gcc/4.9.3
$ ./scripts/compiler.sh add [email protected]
$ ./scripts/compiler.sh try [email protected]

$ module load gcc/7.3.0
$ ./scripts/compiler.sh add [email protected].
$ ./scripts/compiler.sh try [email protected].
$ ./scripts/compiler.sh use [email protected].

Be advised: A system compiler may succeed in installing the small package (libelf) related to try-compiler.sh, but may fail for various other reasons during the build of the more complex stack packages. If this happens, setup another system compiler, and try again.

version: 2019.02.19