Installing Spack on HPC System fails: <unknown file>

Question

I'm following this tutorial to try and install Spack on a large cluster running CentOS 7.

At the bootstrapping step spack spec zlib I get an error:

==> Error: <unknown file>:1: [ordereddict([('compiler', ordereddict([('spec', 'gcc@=4.8.5'), ('paths', ordereddict([('cc', '/bin/gcc'), ('cxx', '/bin/g++'), ('f77', '/bin/gfortran'), ('fc', '/bin/gfortran')])), ('flags', ordereddict()), ('operating_system', 'centos7'), ('target', 'x86_64'), ('modules', []), ('environment', ordereddict()), ('extra_rpaths', [])]))])] is not of type 'object'

I tried different Spack versions. I'm using default settings for the compilers, tried writing compilers.yaml, and set up a clean install multiple times. While spack list works, spack compiler find throws the same error. The compiler settings in this error are correct.

Can't find this error anywhere. Any help is highly appreciated!

Answer 1

This error reminds me of one I had a while ago.

You have to check that when you configure spack you are not using a system gcc and then when you run the spack command the local one (which are probably different versions).

You can try to check that before you run spack, if you use:

which gcc

If you get local (/usr/bin/gcc), that means that you have configured spack with a different python than the one you are using to run it.

I don't know if you still need help but you could try to create a clean conda environment, with a clean python and install spack in the environment. That way you make sure you always use the same gcc.