HPSF Conference 2025

The exascale Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility posed numerous challenges during its development due to its novel scale. One such challenge was in creating a scalable and maintainable scientific software environment. Typical software deployment methods failed to scale and were difficult to maintain over time, necessitating a new way of thinking about software integration. In this talk we present our work on the Aurora Programming Environment, a bespoke scientific programming environment which optimizes for scale and leverages Spack for its strengths in reproducibility, automation, and multiplicative build combinations. We discuss details of the containerized build process and read-only image deployment strategy as well as existing pain points and workarounds. We also examine the future possibilities that our approach opens up, including tightly integrated CI/CD flows and portable containerized access to the PE. We believe this approach is generalizeable and may benefit facilities where traditional software integration methods fall short of needs.