Quick Start

At CSCS (Daint, Tsa, Balfrin)

To set up a Spack instance, clone the repository

$ git clone --depth 1 --recurse-submodules --shallow-submodules -b v0.18.1.12 https://github.com/C2SM/spack-c2sm.git

To load it into your command line, execute

$ . spack-c2sm/setup-env.sh

This auto-detects your machine and configures your instance for it. You can force a machine with an argument. The name has to match a folder in sysconfigs.

$ . spack-c2sm/setup-env.sh tsa

Local machines and Containers

Spack can autodetect compilers and pre-installed packages with

$ spack compiler find
$ spack external find --all

Use packages

To get information about a package, query Spack

$ spack info <package>
# e.g.
$ spack info icon

To see what spack install would install, ask for a spec

$ spack spec <variant>
# e.g.
$ spack spec icon @master +ocean

An unspecfied variant (e.g. ocean) can be concretized to ANY of its values. Spack isn’t required to use the default value when a variant is unspecified. The default value only serves as a tiebreaker.

To install a package

$ spack install <variant>
# e.g.
$ spack install icon @master %gcc +ocean

To locate your install, query Spack

$ spack location --install-dir <variant>

This prints a list of all installs that satisfy the restrictions in your variant.

To run it, you may need to load environment variables

$ spack load <variant>

ICON

ICON is built using environments. Environments sit in a folder with a name and are defined in a spack.yaml file. For ICON, they are located in config/cscs/spack/<version>/<machine>_<target>_<compiler>.

Tip

On Balfrin: In case your Spack environment requires Python, a compatability issue with openssl and git appears.

/usr/bin/ssh: symbol lookup error: /usr/bin/ssh: undefined symbol: EVP_KDF_CTX_free, version OPENSSL_1_1_1d

To circumvent that simply do spack load git prior to activation of the environment.

To activate the Spack environment, type

$ spack env activate -d <path_to_folder_with_spack_yaml>

To install the environment and so ICON, type

$ spack install

Example to build ICON for CPU with NVHPC:

$ spack env activate -d config/cscs/spack/v0.18.1.12/daint_cpu_nvhpc
$ spack install

Attention

Spack will skip the configure phase if icon.mk is found. In case you need to reconfigure you can either delete the file or run make distclean.

Out-of-source builds are possible as follows:

$ mkdir cpu && cd cpu
$ cp -r ../config .
$ spack env activate -d config/cscs/spack/v0.18.1.12/daint_cpu_nvhpc
$ spack install

Attention

Out-of-source build for AutotoolsPackages is not supported by Spack. The implementation for ICON relies on some hacks inside package.py and only works if the build-folder is located inside the Git repo of ICON.

COSMO

COSMO is currently receiving special treatment. It has its own commands in spack-c2sm. The reason for this is that the optional depencendy on the C++ dycore lives in the same repository as COSMO.

To install COSMO

$ spack installcosmo cosmo @<version> %nvhpc <variants> ^mpich%nvhpc

To develop COSMO

$ cd </path/to/package>
$ spack devbuildcosmo cosmo @<version> %nvhpc <variants> ^mpich%nvhpc

Example variants:

$ spack installcosmo cosmo @org-master cosmo_target=cpu # CPU variant of https://github.com/COSMO-ORG/cosmo master
$ spack installcosmo cosmo @org-master cosmo_target=gpu # GPU variant of https://github.com/COSMO-ORG/cosmo master
$ spack installcosmo cosmo @apn_5.09a.mch1.2.p1 cosmo_target=gpu # GPU variant of https://github.com/MeteoSwiss-APN/cosmo/releases/tag/5.09a.mch1.2.p1

Changelog to v0.17.0

Users manage their own instance instead of sourcing a pre-installed instance.
Users decide on their own when they would like to update their instance (i.e. after upgrades at CSCS).
Due to the new concretizer, COSMO needs an explicit ^mpich%nvhpc (Daint) or openmpi%nvhpc (Tsa) in the spec, otherwise the build fails.
On Daint, ICON is built using environments and dev-build no longer supported. On Balfrin, ICON can still be built using dev-build.