European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI)
Thursday, June 25, 2026 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM · 1 hr. (Europe/Berlin)
Hall G1 - 2nd Floor
Birds of a Feather
Community EngagementDevelopment of HPC SkillsDiversity and InclusionRuntime Systems for HPC
Information
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 additional types of infrastructure being used for scientific computing, including commercial cloud platforms, European initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), on premise cloud-like infrastructure, EuroHPC AI Factories, etc.
Delivering and providing access to optimized software 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 community effort to provide a shared repository of optimized installations of scientific software that can be used on a variety of systems.
Software installations included in EESSI are built such that they work on any Linux system, regardless which (version of) Linux distribution is used. The currently most prevalent CPU families in HPC systems, cloud environments, and personal computers are supported (64-bit Intel, AMD, Arm), and RISC-V is actively being explored as well.
EESSI provides optimized software installations for specific CPU microarchitectures (14 in total), and already covers over 650 different open source software projects, not including nearly 3,000 "extensions" (Python packages, R libraries, etc.). In total, this sums up to over 25,000 software installations.
Software is exposed through the well-established environment modules interface, with binaries and libraries being pulled in "on demand" as they are being used. This results in a significantly better user experience than with containers, as users have consistent, fully curated, optimised, and automatically updated environment which requires minimal storage resources, while the entire software stack is always visible. It is effectively a streaming platform for scientific software.
The development of EESSI is currently funded through the MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence. A wider community is growing around it, with several European HPC sites adopting EESSI as their primary central software stack. An overview of systems that are known to have EESSI readily available can be consulted at https://eessi.io/docs/systems .
In addition, EESSI is the base of the Federated Software Catalogue (FSC) of the EuroHPC Federation Platform (EFP, https://my-eurohpc.eu), which is available starting April 2026. EESSI is being deeply integrated in various components of EFP, including EFP Interactive (based on Open OnDemand) which provides a user-friendly web interface for EuroHPC infrastructure, and EFP Workflows (based on LEXIS) which facilitates running cross-site workflows. In this context, EESSI is being deployed on all EuroHPC supercomputers, and will also be made available on upcoming EuroHPC AI Factories.
In this session, we will briefly present the current status of EESSI, give a quick demo of the user experience, and outline future plans with a view to setting priorities based on attendee feedback. Through a live poll we will foster interaction with attendees and trigger discussions. Questions and suggestions raised by attendees will be taken into account when revising the short term roadmap of EESSI.
Organizers:
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 additional types of infrastructure being used for scientific computing, including commercial cloud platforms, European initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), on premise cloud-like infrastructure, EuroHPC AI Factories, etc.
Delivering and providing access to optimized software 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 community effort to provide a shared repository of optimized installations of scientific software that can be used on a variety of systems.
Software installations included in EESSI are built such that they work on any Linux system, regardless which (version of) Linux distribution is used. The currently most prevalent CPU families in HPC systems, cloud environments, and personal computers are supported (64-bit Intel, AMD, Arm), and RISC-V is actively being explored as well.
EESSI provides optimized software installations for specific CPU microarchitectures (14 in total), and already covers over 650 different open source software projects, not including nearly 3,000 "extensions" (Python packages, R libraries, etc.). In total, this sums up to over 25,000 software installations.
Software is exposed through the well-established environment modules interface, with binaries and libraries being pulled in "on demand" as they are being used. This results in a significantly better user experience than with containers, as users have consistent, fully curated, optimised, and automatically updated environment which requires minimal storage resources, while the entire software stack is always visible. It is effectively a streaming platform for scientific software.
The development of EESSI is currently funded through the MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence. A wider community is growing around it, with several European HPC sites adopting EESSI as their primary central software stack. An overview of systems that are known to have EESSI readily available can be consulted at https://eessi.io/docs/systems .
In addition, EESSI is the base of the Federated Software Catalogue (FSC) of the EuroHPC Federation Platform (EFP, https://my-eurohpc.eu), which is available starting April 2026. EESSI is being deeply integrated in various components of EFP, including EFP Interactive (based on Open OnDemand) which provides a user-friendly web interface for EuroHPC infrastructure, and EFP Workflows (based on LEXIS) which facilitates running cross-site workflows. In this context, EESSI is being deployed on all EuroHPC supercomputers, and will also be made available on upcoming EuroHPC AI Factories.
In this session, we will briefly present the current status of EESSI, give a quick demo of the user experience, and outline future plans with a view to setting priorities based on attendee feedback. Through a live poll we will foster interaction with attendees and trigger discussions. Questions and suggestions raised by attendees will be taken into account when revising the short term roadmap of EESSI.
Organizers:
Format
on-site
Targeted Audience
HPC system administrators, HPC user support teams, scientific software developers, end users of HPC infrastructure, computational scientists, ...
BoF Format
Birds of a Feather Meet-up
Speakers
Helena Vela Beltran
Computational ScientistDo IT Now (Spain)
Kenneth Hoste
Expert in Management of Central Software Installations for Scientific ComputingGhent University
Lara Peeters
Scientific Software Support Team MemberGhent University
Sebastian Achilles
HPC and Cloud System engineerJülich Supercomputing Centre
Alan O'Cais
Independent consultantIndependent consultant
