HPSF Conference 2025

Despite Spack's strengths as a feature-rich HPC package manager generating fast executables for HPC apps, its adoption remains limited partly due to a steep learning curve and its perception as primarily a sysadmin tool.

We propose a set of opinionated defaults that help new users quickly adopt best practices with guaranteed reproducibility and architecture compatibilities. The approach draws from conventions used in popular userspace Python package managers like pip and conda which was proven to be effective

Unlike Python, Spack is a source-distribution system, compilation errors are a common challenge. We experimented with smoke-testing compatibility compatibility across compilers, libraries, and x86_64 architectures. Results are encoded into conflict rules into the defaults, such practice can be helpful to avoid many common build failures.

We successfully deployed this approach on x86_64 platforms with substantially different purpose (DL vs HPC), demonstrating its transferability and proving current Spack features sufficient for implementation. Additional DX enhancements will be discussed. The defaults are available as an open-source repository.