(SE) v1.8.0 Spack-stack update for upcoming atlas changes

[Dooruk]

This will happen in September. spack-stack v1.8.0 is not released yet so we can't currently test it.

See details here:

https://github.com/orgs/JCSDA-internal/discussions/147

In the month or two ahead, we'll start requiring atlas 0.38 in JEDI. This brings in various improvements and bugfixes, but of particular interest are fixes to atlas's geometric code used in the generic diffusion operator, fixes to atlas's interpolators, and updates to the atlas GPU support.

Here's what the transition will look like:

The next spack-stack release v1.8.0 will include atlas 0.38.1. The targeted release date for this spack-stack is late August or early Sept. At this stage, JEDI should be usable with atlas versions 0.35 to 0.38, and no immediate updates to software envs or code branches will be needed.

A couple weeks later, we will bump the required atlas version for JEDI to 0.38. The target date is mid September. At this stage, JEDI users will need to update to the latest spack-stack v1.8.0 or compile their own updated atlas.

[Dooruk]

Quick note on this:

Spack-stack release 1.8 switches to Python 3.11, this impacts all the Python relevant modulefiles *.lua scripts as we have to update the Python version via this entry:

local pythondir = "python3.10"

to

local pythondir = "python3.11"

So that following works:

prepend_path("PYTHONPATH", pathJoin(base,"lib",pythondir,"site-packages"))

[Dooruk]

Update from JCSDA on timelines:

• goal to release the next spack-stack (v1.8.0) is now mid-September
• goal to require atlas version 0.38 would therefore be at the end of September