HPC appman: yet aother HPC application package manager

[zhenrong-wang]

Backgrounds:

HPC application management has been tricky for HPC admins, users, and developers. There are several reasons:

• Complex dependencies
• Evolving versions of core components, MPI, compiler, libraries ...
• Different OS types and CPU architectures
• Difficult to manage the source and pre-built packages
• ...

A solution is to develop a package management tool similar to the pip, yum, or apt. Spack is a good practice.

However, spack is not easy enough. The HPC-NOW project introduced a module: appman (APPlication MANager). This module aims to let HPC users/admins/developers deploy and manage HPC packages in an easy and unified way.

The main architecture:

• Frontend: shell scripts ( Bash ) for appman and for every package ( e.g. Lammps, Gromacs, mpich ...)
• Backend: 2 different locations: one for the shell scripts, one for the source and prebuilt binary packages

Main workflow:

• appman config : configure the locations of the backend, url and local path are supported
• appman install/build/remove : Install, build, or remove the HPC applications. You can specify the backend locations by command args. If not specified, the appman will use the configured ones.

Dependencies:

• The system package manager (e.g. YUM or APT) is required to manage some fundamental packages. For example, cmake, make, autoconf ...
• No other dependencies.