Steps to reproduce the issue

Spack should treat /usr/tce/ and /usr/tcemp as system paths on LLNL systems. As it stands common packages like cmake exist in /usr/tce and can preempt a spack required version, leading to spurious errors based on how packages are added to the PATH environment variable. Here is a patch that fixes the issue:

ff --git a/lib/spack/spack/util/environment.py b/lib/spack/spack/util/environment.py
index a9b3529869..47cec8bc1c 100644
--- a/lib/spack/spack/util/environment.py
+++ b/lib/spack/spack/util/environment.py
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
 from six.moves import shlex_quote as cmd_quote
 from six.moves import cPickle
 
-system_paths = ['/', '/usr', '/usr/local']
+system_paths = ['/', '/usr', '/usr/local', '/usr/tcetmp', '/usr/tce']
 suffixes = ['bin', 'bin64', 'include', 'lib', 'lib64']
 system_dirs = [os.path.join(p, s) for s in suffixes for p in system_paths] + \
     system_paths

Error Message

Given a package that depends on a specific version of cmake, LBANN fails to execute cmake because it finds the system version, which is too old. The problem is that /usr/tce/ is in the path and proceeds the spack installed version of cmake.

Information on your system

Additional information

• I have run spack debug report and reported the version of Spack/Python/Platform
• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe this is not a duplicate
• I have run the failing commands in debug mode and reported the output

spack debug report
* **Spack:** 0.16.1-1710-195341113e
* **Python:** 3.7.2
* **Platform:** linux-rhel7-broadwell
* **Concretizer:** original