Spack-Based Packaging and Development for HEP

Abstract

The art event-based analysis framework is used by multiple Intensity Frontier and other experiments and projects in High Energy Physics (HEP). A system of tools and scripts based around a Fermilab-originated package management system called UNIX Product Support (UPS) has evolved to provide development, packaging, release management, and distribution of the art suite, related experimental software and external dependencies in relocatable binary form. The existing system has limitations in environments such as macOS with System Integrity Protection (SIP) enabled and the various High Performance Computing (HPC) systems that the field of HEP is increasingly looking to leverage. This has led to a search for other ways of providing experiments with a packaging and build system that meets their needs. We describe our efforts to develop a packaging and release management system based on the Spack HPC package management tool to replace the existing UPS-based system. We additionally describe a companion system: SpackDev and cetmodules, allowing simultaneous development of multiple HEP software packages in a consistent environment. A successful implementation of the intended system would have applicability across HEP rather than merely to the users of the art framework.