EESSI

The European Environment for Scientific Software Installation

EESSI is an innovative service to make optimized scientific software installations available on any machine anywhere in the world in near real-time - without the need to build or install the software. They work similarly to popular streaming services for videos and music.

For the impatient, the single command to get access to EESSI (on NRIS operated systems) is just

module load EESSI/2023.06

Thereafter, software can be used via environment modules, for example,

module load GROMACS/2024.1-foss-2023b

just like it would be used with a traditionally provided installation.

Note

When loading the EESSI module and using software provided by EESSI for the first time, one may experience a delay because data might need be downloaded from a remote server. EESSI uses CernVM-FS as distribution technology. CernVM-FS employs caching at various levels to provide good startup performance (shown to be equal or better than when software is hosted on a local parallel filesystem, see Performance aspects of CernVM-FS).

Read more about EESSI

• Motivation for EESSI
• Accessing EESSI on NRIS systems
• Using software provided by EESSI

More information about EESSI:

• Adding software to the shared software stacks provided by EESSI, see Adding software to EESSI.

• Building and installing software packages on your local machine (HPC or other) on top of EESSI, see Building software on top of EESSI.

• Getting access to EESSI on any machine (your own, in the Cloud, in CI, …). see Getting Access to EESSI.