Creating and activating your Spack environment

As before, we suggest you use an interactive qlogin session to create and activate your Spack environment.

Once on a compute node, load a Spack module (module load spack/<version>), and then activate the Spack environment using:

Use the Spack modules

Please try to avoid cloning your own version of Spack from GitHub as per the official Spack documentation. Using a module instead means you will use a version we have tested extensively on Apocrita, which may not be the case when cloning via GitHub. Sometimes configuration options change between versions and adjustments would need to be made.

Avoid the spacktivate command

You should always try to use spack env activate rather than the alias spacktivate for activating your personal Spack environments. spacktivate is a bash alias and these won’t work in non-interactive bash environments (such as job scripts for example), so best to avoid using it.

spack env activate -p /data/scratch/${USER}/spack-environments/spack-cmake

The -p flag will once again prepend the name of the activated environment to your prompt in square brackets:

[spack-cmake] [abc123@ddy123 ~]$