HSF Seminar - Software Packaging

Wednesday 24 Jun 2026, 16:30 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

42/3-032 (CERN)

 

The HEP Software Foundation

The HEP Software Foundation facilitates cooperation and common efforts in High Energy Physics software and computing internationally. 
There are several focus activity areas: Data analysis, detector simulation, physics generators, pyHEP, Julia in HEP, reconstruction and software triggers, software developer tools and packaging, and training.
The HSF hosts workshops, provides strategic input and generally raises awareness on the importance of HEP software.

Sign up to HSF mailing lists here.

HSF Seminars

HSF Seminars are nominally hosted on the last Wednesday of each month. Presentations are recorded (given consent) and put on YouTube.
See the full series on indico here!

**Upcoming Seminars**

22nd July: "Green Software Engineering" by Michael Sparks (University of Manchester)
30th Sept: "Assessing Sustainabaility in AI" by Sophia Wilson (SAINTS Lab, University of Copenhagen)

Note: No seminar in August.

Sign up to announcements for future HSF seminars as well as other HSF events by joining hsf-forum@googlegroups.com (sign up instructions).

Have a seminar topic idea? Send an email to hsf-seminar-conveners@googlegroups.com (current organisers are Nicole Skidmore, Michel Jouvin and Claire Antel)

 

YouTube link

16:30 → 16:35 Introduction

16:35 → 16:58 The Key4hep stack: past and present

Key4hep is a turnkey software used in studies of future colliders. Stacks of hundreds of packages are deployed to cvmfs and made easily available to people. During the past years, the stack has been built with the package manager Spack. Recently, a transition to integrate the Key4hep stack into the LCG stacks has been started.

Speaker: Juan Miguel Carceller (CERN)

20260624-key4hep-carceller.pdf

16:58 → 17:15 Packaging and Distributing the HEP Ecosystem on conda-forge

The packaging of high energy physics software with robust, yet flexible, distribution methods is a complicated problem that has been met with multiple approaches by the community. The HEP Packaging Coordination community project expands packaging of the HEP software ecosystem through building and distributing language-agnostic conda packages on the conda-forge package index. Through use of the conda-forge community build cyberinfrastructure, computing platform specific optimized builds of packages can be created for selections of Linux, macOS, and Windows across x86-64 and AArch64/ARM64 platforms.

This process significantly lowers technical barriers across tool development by providing automatic packaging systems with source code, distribution through transparent global-scale build cyberinfrastructure, and enables use through multi-platform optimized binary builds. When combined with next generation scientific package management and manifest tools, the creation of fully specified, portable, and trivially reproducible multi-language software environments becomes easy and fast, even with the use of development platforms for hardware accelerators (e.g. CUDA on NVIDIA GPUs). This talk provides an overview of HEP software in the conda-forge ecosystem, demonstrates automation systems that allow for rolling ABI migrations, and gives practical recommendations for adoption and best practices for both software maintainers and end-user analysts.

Speakers: Chris Burr (CERN), Matthew Feickert (University of Wisconsin (US))

burr_hsf_seminar_2026-06-24.pdf

Talk website

17:15 → 17:32 External software at Belle II: current status and future prospects

This contribution reviews the external software packaging infrastructure used by the Belle II collaboration, highlights limitations of the current Makefile-based approach, and presents ongoing work toward a transition to conda-forge. This effort aims to reduce maintenance overhead, improve integration with the wider scientific software ecosystem, and enable support for additional architectures, including ARM-based platforms.

Speaker: Giacomo De Pietro (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

20260624_BelleII.pdf