⚠ Unofficial · Not affiliated with LLNL or Spack · spack.io →

About LearnSpack

An interactive Spack HPC package manager trainer — no cluster required.

The project

LearnSpack.com is a community learning resource for the Spack HPC package manager. The goal: let anyone learn Spack without needing access to a real HPC cluster.

The trainer simulates real builds — realistic error output, dependency resolution, build phase animations, OpenFOAM CFD runs, SLURM job submission, and MPI parallelism. Every command you practice here transfers directly to a real cluster.

The error catalog documents real build failures from real HPC deployments — explained and solved. The spack.yaml templates and cluster guide help you go from learning to production.

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Keep the project running

Roadmap

IN PROGRESS
Terminal polish & bug fixes
Cursor navigation, readline shortcuts, session persistence, realistic filesystem — continuously improving the terminal to match a real HPC login node.
IN PROGRESS
Package database expansion
271 packages with full dependency trees. Adding more DFT codes, FEM solvers, climate models and ML frameworks with realistic build simulations.
PLANNED
User accounts & progress saving
Save your lesson progress and installed packages permanently across sessions. Requires DB connection (MariaDB on Loopia already provisioned).
PLANNED
Real HPC build logs
Actual compile times, real error output and notes from building full HPC stacks on real hardware.
PLANNED
GPU support guide
CUDA, ROCm and OpenCL with Spack. Variants, toolchains and common pitfalls on GPU nodes.
PLANNED
Container integration
Building Singularity and Charliecloud containers from Spack environments — the modern HPC deployment workflow.
PLANNED
CI/CD for HPC environments
Automated testing and deployment of Spack environments using GitLab CI and GitHub Actions.
IDEA
Package dependency visualizer
Interactive graph of the full dependency tree for any package — zoom, filter, click to drill down.
IDEA
Shareable sessions
Save and share your trainer session — useful for teaching Spack in workshops or university courses.
IDEA
Buildcache server simulator
Simulate a real binary cache server — push/pull, signing, mirror configuration and OCI registry support.

LearnSpack.com is an independent community project.

Not affiliated with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) or the Spack project.

spack.io · Spack on GitHub · Spack docs