Presentation
Scaling a Community with over 1,000 Contributors: Bringing Scientists Together with Spack
Presenter
DescriptionThe Spack package manager centralizes the community knowledge of scientific software installations. Where traditionally cluster sysadmins maintain their own repository of deployment scripts, and developers use their own tooling for local installations, Spack maintains a single, portable package repository that is flexible enough to target any system, from notebook to supercomputer. It bridges the gap between developers and sysadmins, and encourages collaboration across centers. Getting here is not without its challenges, whether technical or social. To meet the demands of diverse user groups and guarantee strong performance, software builds should be sufficiently customizable. At the same time, customizability should not translate into overwhelming complexity for the user. Another challenge is growing a strong contributor base to maintain packages, even when people come and go. And as the contributor base grows, there are new scaling issue to be addressed: testing a few hundred packages is feasible, but how about 7'000? In this talk we discuss these challenges and the lessons learned.
TimeMonday, June 2615:30 - 16:00 CEST
LocationSanada II
SessionMS1H - Code as Community
Event Type
Minisymposium
Computer Science, Machine Learning, and Applied Mathematics