Picongpu: Spack Update for Ubuntu 19.04

[WenyinWei]

Hello guys, would you mind sparing time to update pic for spack on Ubuntu 19.04.

Best Wishes,
Wenyin

[sbastrakov]

Hello @WenyinWei and thanks for your report!

My familiarity with spack is very limited, sorry if my suggestion is super-naive. Did you run something like

spack compiler list | grep -q [email protected] && spack install [email protected] && spack load [email protected] && spack compiler add

(from our documentation) before spack install picongpu %[email protected]?

I am not sure if our spack guru @ax3l is currently available.

[WenyinWei]

Yes! @sbastrakov Thanks a lot for your prompt reply! I followed the document to compile.

Now I guess that it is the fault of Spack rather than PCI. So it may take a long time for Spack to support Ubuntu 19.04 with that gcc compiler cause it is not a LTS version. I would suggest other users on Ubuntu 19.04 to build from source first.

[sbastrakov]

Yes, building from source should definitely be possible. We have detailed instructions for installing all dependencies and then configuring and building PIConGPU.
In case you suspect it might be an issue of spack, did you consider creating an issue there?

[ax3l]

Hey @WenyinWei,
did you recently update your OS? It could also just be the case that the spack configs, stored in $HOME/.spack are outdated then.

You could remove them and run a spack compiler find to check for available compilers as well. Otherwise, just as noted above. Also, you can potentially update your spack sources as well, in case GCC 7.3 was simply not yet released when you cloned spack, or use an older GCC (>=4.9) which will also work just fine.

[ax3l]

P.S. and unrelated: in case you haven't done so already, feel free to add yourself to our community map :)
https://github.com/ComputationalRadiationPhysics/picongpu-communitymap

[WenyinWei]

Fine, I would add myself tomorrow when I go back to office. I had summer research last year in IPP at Greifswald and my pleasure to work with Germans again. It's night in China.

[ax3l]

Thank you for the kind words, we (including our international team and contributors ;) ) are very happy to work with you as well :)

[WenyinWei]

spack compiler list | grep -q [email protected] && spack install [email protected] && spack load [email protected] && spack compiler add

Hi guys, I have figured out where the problem is. Look at the spack load [email protected] command, it does not work at all in my laptop and nothing print.

The solution for me is to make spack load [email protected] && spack compiler add another line of command. It is strange that why the second half part of command failed.

[sbastrakov]

@WenyinWei thanks for investigating! Strange indeed, but a nice catch.

[ax3l]

Glad you found this!
Interesting, did spack install [email protected] potentially fail? Either way, glad you found a solution!

Feel free to close this issue if this solves it for you and open any further issues or questions if you come across them.

[WenyinWei]

Yeah, I guess that once I install [email protected] then when the second time I do spack install [email protected] the command would be recognized as running failure. So the next command spack load [email protected] would not be run?

Anyway, the bug could be seen as settled.

[ax3l]

I am actually a bit puzzled why we recommend the line

spack compiler list | grep -q [email protected] && spack install [email protected] && spack load [email protected] && spack compiler add

it should probably read

spack compiler list | grep -q [email protected] || spack install [email protected] && spack load [email protected] && spack compiler add

because we want to install [email protected] only if it was not found already in the compiler list...

[ax3l]

yes, that's a bug introduced in #2773, will fix.

[WenyinWei]

Ahhh, this is really an interesting and trivial bug😂😂

[ax3l]

;-) Does #2997 work for you?

[WenyinWei]

Enough~ I have succeeded in installing PIC.