Package management in the hands of users: dream and reality

Are HPC users autonomous? How much flexibility does one have when deploying software on a supercomputer? How close to one’s laptop development environment is it? How have EasyBuild, Spack, Guix, and Apptainer helped improve the situation in the past decade?

In this talk, I will look at the situation with lucidity. While Spack and EasyBuild enable software deployment by users, their primary user base appears to be HPC system administrators. Thus most HPC admins let users bring their own Singularity/Apptainer images when their needs are not satisfied—effectively “giving up” on complex deployment.

Brave and fearless, the Guix-HPC effort has not given up on the goal of putting reproducible package management in the hands of users, with successes and disappointments. I will report on our experience with Tier-2 supercomputers now providing Guix, and on ongoing work with French national supercomputers (“Tier-1”) as part of NumPEx, the French national program for HPC.

We will look back at the set of challenges overcome in past years—from supporting rootless execution of the build daemon, to making the bring-your-own-MPI approach viable and to enhancing support for CPU micro-architecture optimizations—and those yet to come.