Mr Harshula Jayasuriya1, Mr Aidan Heerdegen1, Dr Paul Leopardi1, Mr Tommy Gatti1, Mr Gregory Becker2, Dr Emily Kahl3
1ACCESS-NRI, Australia, 2Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA, 3Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Perth, Australia
Biography:
Gregory Becker is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has worked on Spack since 2015, and represents the project on the technical advisory committee of the High Performance Software Foundation. He has done additional research in scalable I/O, ABI compatibility, and benchmark reproducibility. Gregory has been at LLNL since 2015. He received his B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Williams College in 2015.
Harshula is a member of the Model Release team at ACCESS-NRI. He is Free/Open Source Software advocate and a Debian Developer with two decades of experience working with software build systems. Once upon a time, he was a Linux/Unix filesystem engineer working on NFS and UDF at Red Hat Inc and Silicon Graphics Inc.
Aidan is the model release team lead for ACCESS-NRI. He is passionate about making software work for people. In previous roles he provided computational support to climate researchers in two ARC Centres of Excellence, and prior to that was a physical chemist working in a software role supporting X-ray scattering research.
Paul Leopardi is a Research Software Engineer at ACCESS-NRI, currently working on supporting an Earth System Model. His qualifications include a PhD in computational mathematics and experience in teaching numerical linear algebra, optimization and combinatorics. His 40 year background in computing includes working with parallel Fortran codes, High Performance Computing and postprocessing of operational weather forecasting data.
Tommy is a Research Software Engineer for the Model Release Team at ACCESS-NRI. He's a multidisciplinary programmer who enjoys developing CI/CD infrastructure and technical pathfinding in different domains. In previous industry roles he has been a driver developer and member of a third level support team.
Emily is a supercomputing applications specialist at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, where she develops and maintains software for computational omlecular science. She has extensive experience developing and supporting software for molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry, and has spent her fair share of time wrestling with build systems in HPC.
Abstract:
Do you build and deploy complex customised software at HPC centres? Are you a researcher that develops and builds software with complex dependencies that may need to be run at multiple HPC centres? What do Amazon, AMD, CERN, Fermilab, Google, INTEL, LLNL, Microsoft, NOAA, NVIDIA, Riken have in common with ACCESS-NRI, the Bureau of Meteorology and Pawsey?
The answer is Spack! A leading international Spack expert and core-developer, Greg Becker, will describe the Spack 1.0 release, its benefits for users, strategies for seamlessly upgrading to Spack 1.0 and upcoming features. This will be followed by a discussion to elicit feedback from the community.
Additionally, we will discuss the successful community engagement practices undertaken by the Spack project to facilitate and support ACCESS-NRI and Pawsey to meet their objectives.
Two case studies will be presented: Pawsey will describe how it developed a customised Spack configuration and integrated regression testing using the ReFrame framework, allowing automated checks on software installations, production of modules and performance of specific packages; and ACCESS-NRI will describe how Spack is used to develop and deploy climate models for climate researchers to undertake climate simulations for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 7.
Following our well-attended eResearch Australia 2024 BoF, the interest in Spack sparked a monthly Spack user meeting during Australian business hours involving Spack specialists across the USA, Australia and Japan. This BoF will continue the momentum by establishing further collaboration between the eResearch community in Australasia and Spack core-developers.