HPSF Conference 2025: Full Schedule

May 5-8, 2025
Chicago, IL
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IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.

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9:00am CDT

Welcome and Overview - Todd Gamblin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 9:00am - 9:10am CDT

Salon E-G

Speakers

Todd Gamblin

Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 9:00am - 9:10am CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Opening

9:10am CDT

State of the Spack Community, Todd Gamblin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 9:10am - 9:45am CDT

Salon E-G

Speakers

Todd Gamblin

Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 9:10am - 9:45am CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Opening

9:45am CDT

Spack v1.0 - Greg Becker, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 9:45am - 10:20am CDT

Salon E-G

Speakers

Greg Becker

Software Developer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 9:45am - 10:20am CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Opening

10:45am CDT

Optimizing Spack: Multi-Package Parallel Builds for Faster Installation - Kathleen Shea, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 10:45am - 11:05am CDT

Salon E-G

Spack 1.0 will feature faster builds through multi-package parallelism. In this talk, I’ll describe how I accelerated Spack’s package installation process by parallelizing its main installer loop. By enabling Spack to spawn multiple package builds concurrently, this feature increases available parallelism and significantly reduces overall build times for multi-package installations. I'll talk about the design decisions, tradeoffs, and performance gains achieved, providing valuable lessons for optimizing package builds on platforms from laptops to large-scale HPC environments. I’ll also talk about how, even as a a relatively new Spack user, I was able to come up to speed quickly and contribute meaningful improvements to the project.

Speakers

Kathleen Shea

Software Developer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Kathleen Shea graduated from Colorado College with a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science in 2024. She then started her career at Lawrence Livermore National Lab contributing to both Center for Applied Scientific Computing and Livermore Computing. She specializes in core feature development... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 10:45am - 11:05am CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Building Spack

11:05am CDT

Fast Binary Installation with Spack Splicing - John Gouwar, Northeastern University

Wednesday May 7, 2025 11:05am - 11:25am CDT

Salon E-G

Binary package managers allow for the fast installation of binary artifacts, but limit configurability to ensure compatibility between binaries due to rigid ABI requirements. Source package managers allow for more flexibility in building software, since binaries are compiled on demand, but compilation can take a considerable amount of time. Spack has existing a mechanism for mixing source and precompiled packages; however, because Spack does not model ABI compatibility between packages, all transitive dependencies of a binary package must have been built at the same time as that package in order to maintain ABI compatiblity. We present an extension to Spack, which we call splicing, that models ABI compatibility in the package ecosystem and allows seamless mixing of source and binary distribution of packages. This extension augments both the packaging language and dependency resolution engine of Spack in order to maximize reused binaries while maintaining the flexibility of source based management. Through empirical evaluation, we show that our extension incurs minimal performance overhead to dependency resolution while greatly extending the modeling capability of Spack.

Speakers

John Gouwar

Doctoral Student, Northeastern University

John Gouwar is a doctoral student at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, advised by Arjun Guha. His doctoral research, which he began in 2021 and expects to complete in 2026, focuses on programming languages and package management. Gouwar is broadly... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 11:05am - 11:25am CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Building Spack

11:25am CDT

Spack on Windows - John Parent, Kitware, Inc.

Wednesday May 7, 2025 11:25am - 11:45am CDT

Salon E-G

While primarily run, tested, and developed on Unix-like operating systems, in particular HPC systems, scientific software is often deployed on Windows. Spack's recent expansion to Windows marks a significant milestone, enabling its powerful package management capabilities on a new platform.This talk will provide technical insight into the process of adapting Spack to support a platform orthogonal in design to anything Spack has supported in the past. We cover the path to initial support, the current state of Spack on Windows, and look at the roadmap for future Windows development. We’ll explore unique challenges supporting Windows and their solutions. This talk will address design, new features introduced to support Windows development, and how Spack brings needed robust package management to the Windows ecosystem. We’ll cover best practices for porting new or existing packages to Windows, deploying and managing Spack environments in real-world scenarios, and standardizing your Windows development workflows with a focus on common pitfalls for Windows developers. This talk will provide a pathway for attendees interested in supporting Windows to go forth and Spack!

Speakers

John Parent

Senior R&D Engineer, Kitware, Inc.

John Parent is a senior research and development engineer on the Software Solutions Team at Kitware, Inc., where he is the primary developer of the Spack package manager’s Windows support. His other work covers contributions to CMake, establishing complex CI systems and C++ /Python... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 11:25am - 11:45am CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Building Spack

11:45am CDT

Spack CI: Past, Present, and Future - Ryan Krattiger, Kitware, Inc.

Wednesday May 7, 2025 11:45am - 12:05pm CDT

Salon E-G

Spack's Continuous Integration (CI) system is essential for building and distributing reliable HPC software packages. It has dramatically scaled from building hundreds to hundreds of thousands of packages weekly. Leveraging GitLab, Spack CI has evolved from a Linux-only build system to orchestrating runners across diverse providers, architectures, and platforms, supporting multiple domain stacks like E4S, HEP, and Radiuss. Through enhanced monitoring and data-driven methodologies, including machine learning, Spack CI has gained insights to optimizing resource allocation and analyzing failure modes. Improvements to binary caching reduce storage and prevent race conditions. The core goal is to maintain a resilient and efficient CI ecosystem, ensuring the reliability of Spack's HPC software for its expanding community.

Speakers

Ryan Krattiger

Senior Research Engineer, Kitware, Inc.

I am a CFD researcher turned software solutions engineer. Starting at a private CFD company building out HPC frameworks for handling multi-phyiscs and FSI simulations to run on heterogeneous systems. Built CI and testing workflows out of necessity and became and HPC build systems... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 11:45am - 12:05pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Building Spack

1:35pm CDT

E4S and Spack - Sameer Shende, University of Oregon

Wednesday May 7, 2025 1:35pm - 1:55pm CDT

Salon E-G

This talk will describe how the Extreme-Scale Scientific Software Stack is developed and maintained. E4S is an Ecosystem for Science and is layered upon the Spack package manager. This talk will focus on the maintenance of E4S and the continuous integration (CI) on the Frank system at the University of Oregon.

Speakers

Sameer Shende

Research Professor and Director, Performance Research Lab, U. Oregon, University of Oregon

Sameer Shende serves as a Research Professor and the Director of the Performance Research Lab at the University of Oregon and the President and Director of ParaTools, Inc. (USA) and ParaTools, SAS (France). He serves as the Technical Lead of the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 1:35pm - 1:55pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Collaborations using Spack

1:55pm CDT

Spack-Stack: An Interagency Collaboration and Spack Extension - Dom Heinzeller, NRL / UCAR

Wednesday May 7, 2025 1:55pm - 2:15pm CDT

Salon E-G

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems are complex, coupled models with several distinct components. They are often developed by different organizations: national agencies, research institutes, universities, and the community. Naturally, they require extensive third-party libraries and run on a wide range of computational platforms, from the largest high-performance computing systems (HPCs) to low-spec GitHub action runners.

To address this challenge of ever-increasing complexity, in 2021 the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) and NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) created spack-stack, a novel, collaborative effort geared towards universal and portable NWP software environments based on the spack package manager for supercomputers developed at LLNL. The spack-stack collaboration has grown since its inception, and as of 2025 includes the United States Naval Research Lab (NRL) and NOAA’s Earth System Prediction Center (EPIC). The spack-stack software environments are also increasingly used at NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO), making it a core component of some of the Nation’s flagship NWP systems.

Speakers

Dom Heinzeller

Computational Scientist, NRL / UCAR

Dom Heinzeller graduated with a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Following a postdoctoral position on the evolution of protoplanetary disks at Kyoto University, Japan, he moved from Astrophysics to Numerical Weather Prediction. In his NWP career, he worked... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 1:55pm - 2:15pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Collaborations using Spack

2:15pm CDT

Packaging for HPC and HTC in High Energy and Nuclear Physics: Comparing Spack to Other Solutions - Wouter Deconinck, University of Manitoba

Wednesday May 7, 2025 2:15pm - 2:35pm CDT

Salon E-G

High Energy Physics (HEP) and Nuclear Physics (NP) experiments at accelerators facilities use modular software stacks which evolve over the decades-long lifetimes of these efforts. These software stacks have complex dependency trees, often reaching depths of O(50) levels and containing O(1000) nodes, with detailed versioning constraints. Reproducibility requirements demand that previous versions and their dependencies can be recalled on newer hardware architectures. The software stacks are deployed on computing centers around the world, as part of computing grids for high throughput computing and (increasingly) high performance computing. Current tools for managing these stacks have been around for years, but do not always have support for newer computing practices (containerization, integration in development workflows, heterogeneous architectures, deployment to shared file systems such as CernVM-FS). In this session, I will give an overview of the packaging solutions used in HEP and NP, and compare them with Spack in terms of functionality, adaptability, and usability.

Speakers

Wouter Deconinck

Associate Professor, University of Manitoba

Wouter Deconinck is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Manitoba. His research activities focus on experimental nuclear physics, in particular precision measurements of quantities that test our current best theory of fundamental particles and their interactions... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 2:15pm - 2:35pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Collaborations using Spack

2:35pm CDT

Developing and Distributing HEP Software Stacks with Spack - Kyle Knoepfel & Marc Paterno, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 2:35pm - 2:55pm CDT

Salon E-G

The Computational Science and AI Directorate at Fermilab is using Spack to support the development efforts of a large number of scientific programmers, in many independent projects and experiments. While independent, these projects share many dependencies. They are typically under continuous and fairly rapid development. They have to support deployment on diverse hardware. This is a different context than is typical for the management of HPC software, where Spack was born. To support our community, we have created a model that enables users to develop code with greater efficiency than is possible with Spack’s current development facilities.

In this talk we will present:
- a brief introduction to the science we support (particle physics)
how the code we work with is naturally organized into several layers of packages
- how we are using Spack to manage those layers
- how we leverage the layering to provide efficient support for developers, using our Spack extension “MPD”.
- some suggestions for changes or additions to Spack to make such work easier.

Speakers

Kyle Knoepfel

Senior software developer, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

I am a senior software developer at Fermilab, responsible for developing and leading computing framework efforts to meet the data-processing needs of many of Fermilab's experiments.

Marc Paterno

Computer Science Researcher, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Marc Paterno is a Computer Science Researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. His research interests include the design and development of frameworks and libraries for large-scale collection, simulation, and analysis of data in High Energy Physics. He has a Ph.D. in... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 2:35pm - 2:55pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack

2:55pm CDT

GAIA: A Software Deployment Strategy, Ordeals, Success, and General Applicability - Etienne Malaboeuf, CEA

Wednesday May 7, 2025 2:55pm - 3:15pm CDT

Salon E-G

As High-Performance Computing (HPC) transitions from petascale to exascale, we have observed significant changes and new challenges in HPC software management. This presentation details the choices made for building and deploying HPC applications and tooling on the HPE Cray EX Adastra machine at the French National Computer Science Center for Higher Education (CINES). We present the GAIA project, a home-grown solution on top of Spack, allowing us to deploy software stacks for each of our partitions. We expose our requirements, the trade-offs we faced, the choices we made, and the strategy employed to address them. We explain how our users can leverage the Spack configuration provided by CINES to build their own software and the limitations of the approach. We finally take a look at the general applicability and open-sourcing to our site's user base.

Speakers

Etienne Malaboeuf

HPC Engineer, CINES/CEA

I focus on improving the performance of projects related to real-time and high-performance computing, while providing various forms of support to researchers using French supercomputers. I have worked on numerical simulation software in an HPC context, on supercomputers and on game... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 2:55pm - 3:15pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Collaborations using Spack

3:40pm CDT

Closing Gaps in Spack for Software Application DevOps Infrastructure - Phil Sakievich, Sandia National Laboratories

Wednesday May 7, 2025 3:40pm - 3:50pm CDT

Salon E-G

As the demand for efficient DevOps infrastructure for software applications continues to grow, key components such as build processes, build time tests, regression testing, and deployment mechanisms have become critical to successful project delivery. Spack is increasingly being adopted as an orchestration architecture for DevOps, offering a framework that can adapt to various project needs. However, while the overarching patterns among projects may be similar, the specific implementation details can differ significantly, leading to challenges in achieving seamless integration. In this talk, we will present the gaps identified by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Spack's current services and our ongoing efforts to address these challenges.Key topics will include advancements in binary caches, binary provenance, reporting test results, enhancing build performance, and improving the overall developer user experience. Attendees will gain valuable insights into successful initiatives that have effectively closed certain gaps, as well as ongoing issues that remain open for the community to tackle.

Speakers

Phil Sakievich

Senior Computer Scientist R&D, Sandia National Laboratories

Phil comes from a high-performance computing and fluid mechanics background. He became involved with Spack during the ExaScale computing project and author of the Spack-Manager project. Phil is an active member of the Spack technical steering committee and currently leads several... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 3:40pm - 3:50pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Lightning Talks

3:50pm CDT

Development of Complex Software Stacks with Spack - Cedric Chevalier, CEA

Wednesday May 7, 2025 3:50pm - 4:00pm CDT

Salon E-G

In this presentation, we will describe how we manage to develop multi-physics applications with a software stack deployed with Spack.

We will describe how we have designed a workflow, first using Spack features for development, such as "setup," "dev-build," and "develop." And how we ended up creating a Spack plugin to generate custom CMake presets.

CMake presets are a portable way to set up CMake configurations. They can describe several configurations. And they can be exploited by different tools, from the command line to IDE.
Generating these presets from Spack concretizations allows users to exploit their classical environment, benefiting both from a correct installation of their dependencies as well as advanced features of the IDE that do not need to integrate explicitly with Spack.

We will present our journey between the different spack solutions, the development of a CMake "preload cache"-based answer, and we will illustrate use cases of why we ultimately switched to CMake presets.

Speakers

Cedric Chevalier

Research Scientist, CEA

Cédric Chevalier is a research scientist at CEA in France. He is interested in developing libraries for HPC simulation codes, particularly in Linear Algebra and Mesh/Graph partitioning. His work at CEA is led by providing practical ways to exploit newer hardware, use new programming... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 3:50pm - 4:00pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Lightning Talks

4:00pm CDT

Feedback on Using Spack to Deploy a Development Environment for the Gyselalibxx Library - Thomas Padioleau, CEA

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:00pm - 4:10pm CDT

Salon E-G

In this presentation I will present the feedback of packaging and deploying the dependencies of the open source library `gyselalibxx` using Spack on a local cluster and on the national supercomputer Adastra. I will explain the challenges faced to deploy the library and why we chose Spack.

Speakers

Thomas Padioleau

Engineer-Researcher, CEA

Dr. Thomas Padioleau is a CEA Engineer-Researcher at Maison de la Simulation. He leads the DDC project and also works on Voice++.

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:00pm - 4:10pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Lightning Talks

4:10pm CDT

Spack at the Linac Coherent Light Source: Progress, Success, and Challenges - Valerio Mariani, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:10pm - 4:20pm CDT

Salon E-G

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory takes X-ray snapshots of atoms and molecules in action, revealing fundamental processes in materials, technology and living things. Advanced data and computing systems are playing an increasingly vital role in LCLS’s operation: data acquisition software developed at LCLS allows the collection of very high throughput data, and makes sure that all the collected data is stored to disk. Additionally, LCLS provides scientists with sophisticated data analysis frameworks and helps them run their own bleeding-edge scientific analysis tools. With new detectors and analysis techniques being introduced all the time, new software is constantly being developed and maintaining compatibility with old hardware while supporting new frameworks and programs is an everyday challenge. Spack seems to offer a solid foundation for the software development process and is starting to be used at LCLS. This talk will discuss how Spack is making the development process easier and what challenges the LCLS Data Analysis group is still facing in making Spack a useful tool for everyday work.

Speakers

Valerio Mariani

LCLS Data Analysis Department Head, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Dr. Valerio Mariani received his PhD in Biophysics at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and is currently Data Analysis Department Head at Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), part of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has in the past collaborated with world-scale user... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:10pm - 4:20pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Lightning Talks

4:20pm CDT

Towards a Zero-Install Programming Environment - Mike Kiernan & Victor Gamayunov, Microsoft

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:20pm - 4:30pm CDT

Salon E-G

So, we got bored with installing stuff. Our project aims to accelerate time to results, improve reproducibility, and reduce reliance on proprietary programming environments and manual installs. Built on Spack, our tooling enables the rapid deployment of versioned programming environments to globally distributed HPC clusters, ensuring consistency across clusters and regions. This talk will present our solution and the problems it solves for us, discuss its benefits for HPC productivity, and invite community feedback on its broader applicability.

Speakers

Mike Kiernan

Principle Technical Program Manager, Microsoft

Mike Kiernan leads the Public Sector HPC and AI Customer Solutions and Innovation Team at Microsoft, and is based in Cambridge, UK. Joining Mike are Victor Gamayunov and Trevor Cooper-Chadwick, both Technical Program Managers in Mike's team, also based in the UK.

Victor Gamayunov

Senior Technical Program Manager, Microsoft

Victor is a Senior TPM for Azure HPC and AI Customer Solutions and Innovation team at Microsoft. Prior to that he spent 2 decades at Intel in HPC and application engineering.

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:20pm - 4:30pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Lightning Talks

4:30pm CDT

Deploying Software on Frontier with NCCS Software Provisioning (NSP) - Fernando Posada, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:30pm - 4:40pm CDT

Salon E-G

Managing software stacks on high-performance computing (HPC) systems is a complex challenge, particularly when working within vendor-provided programming environments. To address this, the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed NCCS Software Provisioning (NSP), a unified framework for deploying and managing software stacks while monitoring their usage.

NSP leverages Spack and Ansible to automate the deployment of software environments. Using templated configurations, it streamlines Spack-based installations while also managing non-Spack software through custom Ansible roles. Additionally, NSP enhances LMOD-based module environments by incorporating hooks and Spack module projections, enabling a dynamic and responsive software layout that adapts seamlessly to changes in the programming environment.

This presentation will discuss the motivation behind NSP, its strategies for managing software complexity in vendor-provided environments, and its implementation on Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer for open science.

Speakers

Fernando Posada

Group Lead, System Acceptance and User Environment, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Fernando Posada is the group leader of the Systems Acceptance and User Environment group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. During his Ph.D., Fernando developed an interest in High-Performance Computing and... Read More →

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:30pm - 4:40pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Lightning Talks

4:40pm CDT

Organizational Approach to Spack Engagement: A Case Study - Phil Sakievich, Sandia National Laboratories

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:40pm - 4:50pm CDT

Salon E-G

The rapid growth in features, capabilities, and adoption of Spack has transformed it into a vital tool for managing software dependencies in scientific computing. However, one of the significant challenges faced by large organizations is the effective communication and information sharing across diverse teams. This talk will present a case study from Sandia National Laboratories, detailing the evolution and impact of strategies implemented to address these communication hurdles. We will explore the formation of a self-organized working group dedicated to fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange around Spack, as well as a recently funded initiative aimed at enhancing Spack collaboration and development efforts. By examining the successes and lessons learned from these organizational approaches, we aim to provide insights into best practices for engaging teams in the adoption of Spack, ultimately promoting a more cohesive and efficient development environment. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of how structured engagement strategies can facilitate the integration of Spack within large organizations and enhance collaborative software development efforts.

Speakers

Phil Sakievich

Senior Computer Scientist R&D, Sandia National Laboratories

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:40pm - 4:50pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Lightning Talks

4:50pm CDT

Dynamic Resource Allocation for Continuous Integration Build Pipelines - Caetano Melone, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:50pm - 5:00pm CDT

Salon E-G

Spack team members manage a complex continuous integration (CI) infrastructure to compile and test software distributed via a centralized build cache. The workflows are executed in virtualized cloud environments, an approach that offers considerable flexibility in resource provisioning, resulting in quick feedback on pull requests submitted by the Spack community. However, fixed resource allocations for build jobs lead to job failures, slowdowns, and suboptimal resource usage.

spack-gantry aims to address these challenges by providing resource allocation predictions to build pipelines. We use historical build data to forecast future utilization and set resource limits. We will present strategies used to find optimal predictions, as well as experiments to create an online prediction service modeled after a genetic algorithm. The results of this work include improvements in usage efficiency and cost-per-job metrics.

Because spack-gantry involves modifications to the current CI system, we will discuss ramifications for users and developers and solicit feedback about how to make the infrastructure more user-friendly, reliable, and functional for the Spack community.

Speakers

Caetano Melone

Software Developer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Caetano Melone is a software developer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on open-source tools for HPC developer productivity.

Wednesday May 7, 2025 4:50pm - 5:00pm CDT
Salon E-G

Spack, Lightning Talks