Introduction to EESSI: the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations

Installing scientific software for supercomputers is known to be a tedious and time-consuming task.
The application software stack continues to deepen, especially as the HPC user community becomes
more diverse, computational science expands rapidly, and the diversity of system architectures
increases. Simultaneously, we see a surge in interest in cloud computing for scientific computing.
Delivering optimised software installations and providing access to these installations in a reliable,
user-friendly, and reproducible way is an increasingly highly non-trivial task that affects software
developers, HPC user support teams, and researchers running scientific workloads on HPC systems.

This tutorial aims to address these challenges by introducing the European Environment for
Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, pronounced as “easy”), a collaboration between various
European HPC sites & industry partners. The goal of EESSI is to provide 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 virtual machine in the cloud, or a personal workstation.

We cover the basics of EESSI, different use cases for EESSI, how to add software to EESSI, and
highlight some more advanced features. We will also show how to engage with the community and
contribute to the project.