Harmen Stoppels

Abstract Spack is a flexible multi-language package manager for HPC, Data Science, and AI, designed to support multiple versions, configurations, and compilers of software on the same system. Since the last FOSDEM, the Spack community has reached a major milestone with the release of Spack v1.0, followed closely by v1.1.

In high performance computing, package managers like Nix, Guix, Gentoo Prefix, and Spack are used to install applications and their dependencies. They allow multiple variants and flavors of the same package to coexist, by installing every package into a unique prefix directory that embeds a hash derived from the dependency graph.