Stackinator¶
A tool for building a scientific software stack from a recipe on HPE Cray EX systems.
It is used to build software vClusters on Alps infrastructure at CSCS.
Getting Stackinator¶
To get the latest version, download directly from GitHub.
Once installed, add the bin sub-directory to your path:
Info
The main branch of Stackinator includes features for Spack v1.0, and may break older recipes.
For existing recipes use Spack v0.23 and earlier, use version 5
Requirements¶
To run stackinator uv needs to be installed.
Versions¶
Stackinator version 6 will be the first release of Stackinator to support Spack 1.0, when it is released in June 2025. There will be significant changes introduced in Spack 1.0, which will require making some non-trivial changes to Stackinator, and possibly adding breaking changes to the Stackinator recipe specification.
The git branch releases/v5 will be maintained to provide support for all versions 0.21, 0.22 and 0.23 of Spack and existing recipes.
The main branch of Stackinator will contain
Quick Start¶
Stackinator generates the make files and spack configurations that build the spack environments that are packaged together in the spack stack.
It can be thought of as equivalent to calling cmake or configure, before running make to run the configured build.
# configure the build
stack-config --build $BUILD_PATH --recipe $RECIPE_PATH --system $SYSTEM_CONFIG_PATH
Where the BUILD_PATH is the path where the build will be configured, the RECIPE_PATH contains the recipe for the sotware stack, and SYSTEM_CONFIG_PATH is the system configuration for the cluster being targeted.
Once configured, the build stack is built in the build path using make:
# build the spack stack
cd $BUILD_PATH
env --ignore-environment PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:`pwd`/spack/bin make modules store.squashfs -j64
See the documentation on building Spack stacks for more information.
Once the build has finished successfully the software can be installed.
Alps
On Alps the software stack can be tested using the uenv image generated by the build: