Floss For Science

In episode 30, we interviewed Todd Gamblin from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about the Spack project. We discussed his current research project along with his involvement in Spack. We widely discussed the philosophy of Spack, some usage patterns, its capabilities for managing package management in HPC clusters as well as standalone computers and which operating systems it supports at the moment. Todd shared with us his opinion on the trend for containerized workloads to achieve reproducible science and why it may not be the goal we need to set. He highlighted for us the similarities and differences between EasyBuild and Spack as well as the origin of those differences. We finished the interview with our usual quick questions. 00:00:00 Intro music 00:00:17 Introduction 00:00:36 Introducing Todd Gamblin 00:00:58 His current research topics 00:01:23 Spack as official duties 00:01:43 Spack usage at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 00:02:01 Other research projects 00:02:47 Profiling in HPC 00