Spack on AWS cluster

Deploying an HPC cluster on Amazon Web Services might sound daunting, but it’s possible with Spack. Harvard’s Jiawei Zhuang has written a guide for standing up a cloud-HPC cluster using AWS ParallelCluster, Slurm, and Spack. The guide provides an easy-to-follow workflow using the Weather Research and Forecasting model as an example.

Zhuang and the GEOS-Chem team at Harvard made a reproducible cloud simulation using Spack. Check out their paper, “Enabling high-performance cloud computing for Earth science modeling on over a thousand cores: application to the GEOS-Chem atmospheric chemistry model,” which describes using Spack to build caches.