The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, pronounced as “easy”) is a collaboration between different European partners (including RUG) in the HPC community. The goal of this project is to build a common stack of scientific software installations for HPC systems and beyond, including laptops, personal workstations and cloud infrastructure.

Software installations in High Performance Compute clusters are almost always compiled from source in order to optimize the installation for the specific hardware of each node. This means that certain software can take a long time to install, or at times the installation may even be impossible in a certain system given the resources available. Since many HPC support teams continually work on new software installations for their systems, this means a lot of repetitive and duplicate work is happening all the time. By having a centrally installed and optimized scientific software stack available and free to use everywhere, researchers can have the software they need in whatever system they use, and support teams have more time to help users with questions and daily system maintenance.

Using EESSI on Hábrók

The EESSI software stack is available in Hábrók as a separate software stack and can be quickly initialized with:

module load EESSI/2023.06

After this set-up, the usual module commands will be aware of the EESSI stack, for example:

module avail OpenFOAM/12-foss-2023a
 
--------------------- /cvmfs/software.eessi.io/versions/2023.06/software/linux/x86_64/amd/zen3/modules/all --------------------- 
   OpenFOAM/12-foss-2023a (D)
 
  Where:
   D:  Default Module

The module above (OpenFOAM/12-foss-2023a) is not available in Hábrók's internal software stack but upon loading EESSI, it becomes available. To use it, we can load it with module load OpenFOAM/12-foss-2023a just like any other module.

Because the EESSI software stack is continually updated with new optimized software installations, there are good chances that your software of choice is already available there, even if it hasn't been locally installed in Hábrók yet.

Note that EESSI's software stack cannot be used simultaneously with Hábrók's locally installed software stack (that is, the one you can access directly upon login, without loading EESSI/2023.06). When you load EESSI, the Hábrók software stack will be automatically disabled. You can restore it by loading the Hábrók stack again, with module load 2023.01. This is to ensure that potentially incompatible software is not loaded at the same time.

EESSI in other contexts

You can also use the EESSI software stack locally on your laptop, desktop computer or lab workstation. The installation process is very simple, for more details see the relevant documentation page.

Additionally, EESSI is also deployed in the University's Linux Work Place, meaning the entire EESSI software stack is also available in this environment!