Minisymposium Presentation

Spack is a founding project in the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF), a nascent Linux Foundation project umbrella that aims to support open source projects as part of a portable, accelerated software stack for high performance computing. The Spack team has contemplated joining a foundation for a long time, but the plan for doing so has evolved significantly from initial conception to the now-established HPSF.

Initially, the Spack team simply wanted a neutral home to foster collaboration and to pay for project-specific expenses, like user meetings and a Slack workspace. However, Spack was also part of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a collaboration of over 1,000 scientists and around 100 different software projects. As ECP drew to an in 2023, it became apparent that many teams had similar needs. Rather than start a single foundation project, the Spack team joined forces with 9 other projects to start HPSF, which we hope will provide a path to expand HPC software’s reach further into AI, industrial, academic, and other communities. This talk will discuss the specific needs of Spack and how the HPSF concept evolved to cover the needs of Spack and the HPC ecosystem as a whole.