Spack Installation

Install Arbor

To install Arbor using Spack, run spack install arbor.

Build Options

Arbor can be built with various options, just like the regular CMake build. For instance, to have Spack build Arbor with MPI enabled, run spack install arbor +mpi. For a full overview of the build options, please refer to the our Spack package.yml.

Why use Spack?

Spack is a package manager for supercomputers, Linux, and macOS. It makes installing scientific software easy. Spack isn’t tied to a particular language; you can build a software stack in Python or R, link to libraries written in C, C++, or Fortran, and easily swap compilers or target specific microarchitectures.

A powerful feature for users of scientific software is Spack’s Environment feature. One can define and store software environments for reuse, to generate container images or reproduce and rerun software workflows at a later time.

Issues when using Spack

On some systems initial Spack setup requires an extra step currently not shown in the up-front installations instructions of the Spack documentation, which is adding the compilers on your system to Spack’s configuration. If you don’t, you may get this error:

No satisfying compiler available is compatible with a satisfying os

The solution is to run (as described further down in the official documentation):

./spack compiler add

To get help in case of problems, please make an issue at Arbor’s issues page.