Hacker News Reader

Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I worked on an ARM supercomputer, as well as a POWER9 one. x86 is so assumed for anything other than trivial things that it is painful.

What I found was a good solution was using Spack: https://spack.io/ That allows you to download/build the full toolchain of stuff you need for whatever architecture you are on - all dependencies, compilers (GCC, CUDA, MPI, etc.), compiled Python packages, etc. and if you need to add a new recipe for something it is really easy.

For the fellow Brits - you can tell this was named by Americans!!!

View on HN

It's good that you've mentioned Spack but not for HPC work, and that's very interesting.

This a high level overview by one of the Spack authors from the HN post back in 2023 (top comment from 100 comments), including the Spack original paper link [1]:

At a very high level, Spack has:

* Nix's installation model and configuration hashing

* Homebrew-like packages, but in a more expressive Python DSL, and with more versions/options

* A very powerful dependency resolver that doesn't just pick from a set of available configurations -- it configures your build according to possible configurations.

You could think of it like Nix with dependency resolution, but with a nice Python DSL. There is more on the "concretizer" (resolver) and how we've used ASP for it here:

* "Using Answer Set Programming for HPC Dependency Solving", https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08404

[1] Spack – scientific software package manager for supercomputers, Linux, and macOS (100 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35237269

Well to be fair, I'd consider this to be semi-HPC work - obviously it's not multi-node but because of the hardware it's not the same as using it on an ordinary desktop machine either and has many of the challenges of HPC too in getting stuff compiled for it, particularly with it being ARM based. What you learn when you work on this stuff is that you need very specific combinations of packages that your distro just isn't going to be able to do, and Homebrew doesn't give you enough flexibility in that.

Who says we don’t have a sense of humor.

It's that it's an offensive term here, not a funny one.

Aussie checking in, smokos over, get back to work...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com