What if there was a way to avoid having to install a broad range of scientific software from scratch on every HPC cluster or cloud instance you use or maintain, without compromising on performance?
Installing scientific software for supercomputers is known to be a tedious and time-consuming task. Especially as the HPC user community becomes more diverse, computational science expands rapidly, and the diversity of system architectures increases, the application software stack continues to deepen. Simultaneously, we see a surge in interest in cloud computing for scientific computing. Delivering optimized software installations and providing access to these installations in a reliable, user-friendly, and reproducible way is a highly non-trivial task that affects application developers, HPC user support teams, system administrators, and end users.
The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, https://www.eessi.io) is a collaboration between various European HPC sites & industry partners, with the common goal of creating a shared repository of scientific software installations that can be used on a variety of systems, regardless of which flavor/version of Linux distribution or processor architecture is used, or whether it’s a full size HPC cluster, a cloud environment or a personal workstation.
The effort is currently funded via the MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence.
In this BoF, we want to engage with the HPC community, and discuss how EESSI could help alleviate the burden of getting scientific software installed. We will briefly present and demo the current status of the project, and foster an interactive discussion on the focus and next steps.
Contributors:
