Spack Community BoF

Thursday, June 25, 2026 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM · 1 hr. (Europe/Berlin)

Hall G1 - 2nd Floor

Birds of a Feather

Community EngagementCompiler and Tools for Parallel Programming

Information

Spack is a package manager for scientific computing. With nearly 1,500 contributors from academia, industry, and government laboratories, Spack is a broad collaboration with a wide range of use cases, from small-scale development on laptops and clusters, to software release management, to software deployment on many of the top supercomputer sites in the world.

At ISC 2026, we plan to announce the release of Spack v1.2 and discuss the features that have been added in the last year:

- Enhanced control over compiler selection, in particular in environments

- Customizable configuration scopes with the `include:` attribute

- External package model accounting for dependencies

- New installer UI that allows to show progress on multiple parallel builds concurrently

We'll also touch on various performance improvements that impacted (in a positive way!) the usability of Spack, and compare Spack v1.0 with Spack v1.2 on some benchmarks.

Following the highlights, we will shift to questions and an interactive user survey. All are invited to provide feedback, request features or changes, and participate in the discussion! Users will be encouraged to discuss specific use-cases and we will have Spack developers on-stage ready to answer and questions from the community.

Join the BOF and help us make HPC software installation simple!

Organizers:

Format

on-site

Targeted Audience

Spack has a broad audience, including HPC users who simply install and run packages, developers who author their own packages and automate their dependency management, HPC facility staff who deploy large software stacks with packages and modules, and team deployment specialists who deploy software stacks targeted towards a specific team.

BoF Format

Birds of a Feather Meet-up