Pre-built environments

With this installation method, you will need to select a pre-made environment from the ska-sdp-spack repository.

Prerequisites

Select that your system matches one of the following:

Environment	Platform	Processor Architecture
`env/aws/ubuntu`	Ubuntu 22.04	x86_64_3
`env/aws/rhel`	RHEL 9	x86_64_3

In contrast to the custom installation method (Custom environments) you will only need relatively few prerequisites, specifically Git and Python 3.10 or later:

$ sudo apt-get install -y git python-3

The equivalent for Red Hat:

$ dnf install -y git python3

Installation

Step 1: Install Spack

You can skip this step if you already have Spack installed, but make sure that you have the correct version, or the installation might not work:

$ git clone --depth=2 --branch=releases/v1.1 https://github.com/spack/spack.git
$ . spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh

You will have to repeat . spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh in the future if you want to run any further Spack commands.

Step 2: Clone ska-sdp-spack, activate environment

Check out the repository, and activate the appropriate environment (see table above):

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/sdp/ska-sdp-spack.git
$ cd ska-sdp-spack
$ spack env activate env/aws

Step 3: Install software

You can review what software is part of the environment:

$ spack spec

To actually install the software, select the packages you want from the list:

$ spack install wsclean dp3 --only-concrete

This should proceed to download the appropriate packages from the SKA build cache and install them on your machine. Adding --only-concrete makes sure that no packages are installed that are not part of the pre-built environment.

Step 4: Use software

At this point the software is installed into Spack directories. To use the software, load it into the environment as follows:

$ spack load wsclean
$ wsclean

This depends on Spack and the Spack environment being loaded. The following will work directly:

$ spack/bin/spack -e ska-sdp-spack/env/aws load wsclean
$ wsclean

Note that depending on the package you load, this might bring a number of software packages into scope. Especially be mindful that this might override your Python installation with a Spack-provided one!

Maintenance

To update to a newer version of ska-sdp-spack, pull new changes from Git and re-install changed packages:

$ cd ska-sdp-spack
$ git pull origin
$ spack env activate env/aws
$ spack install [package-list]

You might also want to consider cleaning up temporary files and older installed packages to reclaim disk space:

$ spack clean
$ spack gc