Next steps

Now you have completed this tutorial, you should be in a strong position to create your own Spack environments. What we have covered in this tutorial is merely a starting point, and there are many possibilities open to you now that you hopefully have a grasp of the basics.

A huge benefit of Spack Environments is that once you have a working spack.yaml file for a specific environment, you can use that file in future to recreate the same environment again, and also share the file with others so that they can also recreate it (just as we have done in this tutorial in fact). You may wish to take this idea a step further and investigate spack.lock files, which contain the fully configured and concretized specs for an environment. We haven't covered this more advanced file format in this tutorial, but you can find out more about them in the official Spack documentation.

If you have any questions regarding the use of Spack on Apocrita, you can contact us on our Slack (QMUL users only) - there is a specific #spack channel for Spack queries. You can also send an email to its-research-support@qmul.ac.uk which is handled directly by staff with relevant expertise.

In addition, Spack has a large community and we may in fact sometimes ask you to raise an issue in their GitHub repository. Spack also has a Slack workspace which is very active and has a lot a different channels (including an #environments one) for specific queries, so if you think you are going to make Spack a big part of your Apocrita usage, it would be well worth joining.