SPACK Mirror on JLab CUE

Overview

SPACK is a package manager used to maintain multiple versions of software compiled at JLab. The spack manager takes care of many stages of managing the software packages used for the scientific program at the lab. It keeps track of multiple software versions built using multiple compilers and even with multiple dependency lists. For example, you can have a version of gemc that uses root v6.18/00, GEANT 10.1.02, and was built with the gcc 9.2.0 compiler. You can also build another version which changes any or all of those version numbers and spack will happily organize it.

Mostly, we want to use spack to centrally manage some standard builds of commonly used software packages. This avoids every researcher from having to build their own copies which can be costly in storage, computing, and time. This will include external, 3rd party packages like CLHEP and internal software like gemc.

Mac OS X

Some binaries are available for the macosx platform. One issue here is that multiple versions of the Apple supplied compiler are available. This complicates things since one would need to maintain a complete set of builds for multiple compilers in order to support the multiple OS versions. To simplify things, we instead use a compiler installed by spack itself to build the packages. This gives end users access to the compiler which can be used consistently regardless of the exact Mac OS X system version you are using. Note that we also compile the packages with the generic x86_64 target for a similar reason: to be independent of the exact flavor of CPU being used. Thus, the packages are built with:

compiler: gcc 10.2.0 target: x86_64

Using the prebuilt binaries

The binaries can be accessed in two different ways: via the mirror interface on the web or via CVMFS.