THAPI-spack

This repository provides a Spack environment for installing and managing THAPI.

How to Install THAPI

✍️Note: This guide assumes spack is installed and available in your PATH. If it is not, see How to Install Spack.

# Clone the THAPI-spack repository and add it as a Spack repo
git clone https://github.com/argonne-lcf/THAPI-spack
spack repo add ./THAPI-spack/
# Install THAPI
spack install thapi

Once installed, you can load THAPI with:

spack load thapi

Tips For Speeding Up THAPI Installation

spack external find

spack external find can be used to find existing packages on the system known to Spack. This way you can avoid building them when building THAPI. Use the following command before installing THAPI to find external packages available on the system:

spack external find --all

Make sure to module load the packages you want Spack to find (or set other environment variables like PATH) before running spack external find --all.

Some packages when found using spack external find are known to cause build failures. If you run into such cases, use spack external find --exclude <pkg> so that Spack will build them instead of using the system installed versions. For example:

spack external find --all --exclude bzip2 --exclude xz --exclude curl

spack install -j<core> <spec>

Depending on the number of available cores on your platform, you can specify number of parallel build processes to be used during the build of spec using -j option to spack (e.g., -j16).

--concurrent-packages

One may also be able to reduce the time to install THAPI by using --concurrent-packages option in spack install as below:

spack install --concurrent-packages 2 thapi

Depending on the available number of CPU cores and how parallelizable the dependency graph is for the particular specification, one may be able to specify more concurrent packages (as compared to 2 in the above example).

Building THAPI Manually

You can use Spack to install the required dependencies and set up the environment to build THAPI manually from source (without using Spack to build THAPI):

spack build-env thapi bash

This will spawn a new shell with the correct environment variables and dependencies set for building THAPI manually. This is useful when building THAPI for your own development work.

Known Issues

• THAPI Spack package (and some of its dependencies) is known to run into build failures with NVHPC SDK (available on ALCF Polaris for example). Please make sure to use GNU programming environment whenever possible.
• Users have noticed spack processes getting killed (due to timeout) on login nodes on both ALCF Aurora and Polaris. Use a compute node whenever possible.

Miscellaneous

How to Install Spack

⚠️ Important: The default branch for Spack is develop, which is unstable. To ensure a reliable installation, use the latest release of Spack.

To install Spack:

git clone -c feature.manyFiles=true -b releases/latest https://github.com/spack/spack.git
. spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh