d. Install Spack

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Install Spack

Spack is a package manager for supercomputers, Linux, and macOS. It makes installing scientific software easy. Spack isn’t tied to a particular language; you can build a software stack in Python or R, link to libraries written in C, C++, or Fortran, and easily swap compilers or target specific microarchitectures. In this tutorial we’ll use Spack to compile and install weather codes.

First, on the head node - which we connected to via SSM or DCV we’ll run:

export SPACK_ROOT=/shared/spack
git clone -b v0.19.1 -c feature.manyFiles=true https://github.com/spack/spack $SPACK_ROOT
echo "export SPACK_ROOT=/shared/spack" >> $HOME/.bashrc
echo "source \$SPACK_ROOT/share/spack/setup-env.sh" >> $HOME/.bashrc
source $HOME/.bashrc

Spack Build Cache

We are going to install the weather codes from a Spack binary build cache/mirror. In order to do this we need to install a few more python packages.

pip3 install botocore boto3

Next we add the mirror and trust the GPG keys that have signed the packages. If you want to verify the GPG keys, they are on OpenGPG.

spack mirror add aws-hpc-weather s3://aws-hpc-weather/spack_v0.19.1/
spack buildcache keys --install --trust --force