European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) (EUM'21)
Channel: EasyBuild
Date: 2021-01-26

by Bob Dröge (Univ. of Groningen, The Netherlands) at the EUM'21 (https://easybuild.io/eum​).
For comments and questions, please use the #eum​ channel in the EasyBuild Slack, see https://easybuild.io/eum/#practical-info​ for details.

The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, pronounced as "easy") is a collaboration between different HPC sites and industry partners, with the common goal to set up 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 is a full-size HPC cluster, a cloud environment or a personal workstation.

The concept of the EESSI project was inspired by the Compute Canada software stack,
and consists of three main layers:

- a filesystem layer leveraging the established CernVM-FS technology, to globally distribute the EESSI software stack;

- a compatibility layer using Gentoo Prefix, to ensure compatibility with different client operating systems (different Linux distributions, macOS, Windows Subsystem for Linux);

- a software layer, hosting optimized installations of scientific software along with required dependencies, which were built for different processor architectures, and where archspec, EasyBuild and Lmod are leveraged;

In this talk, we will present how the EESSI project grew out of a need for more collaboration to tackle the challenges in the changing landscape of scientific software and HPC system architectures. The project structure will be explained in more detail, covering the motivation for the layered approach and the choice of tools, as well as the lessons learned from the work done by Compute Canada. The goals we have in mind and how we plan to achieve them going forward will be outlined.

Finally, we will demonstrate the current pilot version of the project, and give you a feeling of the potential impact.