Tutorial: Spack 101

This is an introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented at the SCA/HPCAsia 2026 Conference Conference on January 26, 2026. The event was full day in-person tutorial.

You can use these materials to teach a course on Spack at your own site, or you can just skip ahead and read the live demo scripts to see how Spack is used in practice.

Slides

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Full citation: Gregory Becker, Kathleen Shea, and Todd Gamblin. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. SCA/HPCAsia 2026. Osaka, Japan, January 26-29, 2026.

Video

For the last recorded video of this tutorial, see the HPCIC Tutorial 2024 version.

Live Demos

We provide scripts that take you step-by-step through basic Spack tasks. They correspond to sections in the slides above.

To run through the scripts, we provide the spack/tutorial container image. You can invoke

$ docker pull ghcr.io/spack/tutorial:sc25
$ docker run -it ghcr.io/spack/tutorial:sc25

to start using the container. You should now be ready to run through our demo scripts:

  1. Basic Installation Tutorial

  2. Environments Tutorial

  3. Configuration Tutorial

  4. Package Creation Tutorial

  5. Stacks Tutorial

  6. Developer Workflows Tutorial

  7. Binary Caches Tutorial

  8. Scripting with Spack

Other sections from past tutorials are also available, although they may not be kept up-to-date as frequently:

  1. Module Files Tutorial

  2. Spack Package Build Systems

  3. Advanced Topics in Packaging

Full contents:

Links

Tutorial

Additional sections