Introduction to Spack

Applies to Linux

2024-01-11

14 min read time

Spack is a package management tool designed to support multiple software versions and configurations on a wide variety of platforms and environments. It was designed for large supercomputing centers, where many users share common software installations 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 users can concisely specify versions and configuration options. Spack is also simple for package authors: package files are written in pure Python, and specs allow package authors to maintain a single file for many different builds of the same package.

ROCM packages in Spack

Component	Package name
rocm-cmake	rocm-cmake
thunk	hsakmt-roct
rocm-smi-lib	rocm-smi-lib
hsa	hsa-rocr-dev
lightning	llvm-amdgpu
devicelibs	rocm-device-libs
comgr	comgr
rocclr (vdi)	hip-rocclr
hipify_clang	hipify-clang
hip (hip_in_vdi)	hip
ocl (opencl_on_vdi )	rocm-opencl
rocminfo	rocminfo
clang-ocl	rocm-clang-ocl
rccl	rccl
atmi	atmi
rocm_debug_agent