EESSI: A streamed, production-quality, multi-platform HPC software stack
he European Environment for Scientific Software Installations EESSI project aims to provide a ready-to-use stack of production-quality scientific software installations that can be leveraged easily on a variety of platforms, ranging from personal workstations to cloud environments and supercomputer infrastructure, without making compromises with respect to performance. Unlike containers, it exists natively on the host system with direct access to hardware and can be remotely updated (for bug fixes, security, etc.). From an education perspective, it is an exciting prospect as it provides a consistent user experience across all platforms which is quickly reproducible by learners on the systems they have access to. For course providers it has the potential to provide a common layer that can be leveraged in other tools (such as Magic Castle, which can deploy Slurm clusters in a wide range of cloud providers) and to collaboratively develop training content (such as that developed by HPC Carpentry.
he European Environment for Scientific Software Installations EESSI project aims to provide a ready-to-use stack of production-quality scientific software installations that can be leveraged easily on a variety of platforms, ranging from personal workstations to cloud environments and supercomputer infrastructure, without making compromises with respect to performance. Unlike containers, it exists natively on the host system with direct access to hardware and can be remotely updated (for bug fixes, security, etc.). From an education perspective, it is an exciting prospect as it provides a consistent user experience across all platforms which is quickly reproducible by learners on the systems they have access to. For course providers it has the potential to provide a common layer that can be leveraged in other tools (such as Magic Castle, which can deploy Slurm clusters in a wide range of cloud providers) and to collaboratively develop training content (such as that developed by HPC Carpentry.