Spack

Spack is a package management tool designed to support multiple versions and configurations of software on a wide variety of platforms and environments. It was designed for large supercomputing centers, where many users and application teams share common installations of software on clusters with exotic architectures, using libraries that do not have a standard ABI. Spack is non-destructive: installing a new version does not break existing installations, so many configurations can coexist on the same system.

Most importantly, Spack is simple. It offers a simple spec syntax so that users can specify versions and configuration options concisely. Spack is also simple for package authors: package files are writtin in pure Python, and specs allow package authors to write a single build script for many different builds of the same package.

See the Feature Overview for examples and highlights.

To install spack and install your first package:

$ git clone https://github.com/scalability-llnl/spack.git
$ cd spack/bin
$ ./spack install libelf

Documentation

Full documentation for Spack is also available.

Get Involved!

Spack is an open source project. Questions, discussion, and contributions are welcome. Contributions can be anything from new packages to bugfixes, or even new core features.

Mailing list

If you are interested in contributing to spack, the first step is to join the mailing list. We're currently using LLNL's old-fashioned mailing list software, so you'll need to click the links below and send the resulting email to subscribe or unsubscribe:

• Subscribe
• Unsubscribe

Contributions

At the moment, contributing to Spack is relatively simple. Just send us a pull request. When you send your request, make develop the destination branch.

Spack is using a rough approximation of the Git Flow branching model. The develop branch contains the latest contributions, and master is always tagged and points to the latest stable release.

Authors

Spack was written by Todd Gamblin, tgamblin@llnl.gov.

Significant contributions were also made by:

• David Beckingsale
• David Boehme
• Alfredo Gimenez
• Luc Jaulmes
• Matt Legendre
• Greg Lee
• Adam Moody
• Saravan Pantham
• Joachim Protze
• Bob Robey
• Justin Too

Release

Spack is released under an LGPL license. For more details see the LICENSE file.

LLNL-CODE-647188