NESSI and EESSI

The Norwegian Environment for Scientific Software Installation

and

The European Environment for Scientific Software Installation

NESSI and EESSI are innovative services 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 NESSI (on NRIS operated systems) is just

module load NESSI/2023.06

and for EESSI it is similarly

module load EESSI/2023.06

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

module load GROMACS/2023.1-foss-2022a

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

Note

When loading the NESSI/EESSI modules and using software provided by NESSI/EESSI for the first time, one may experience a delay because data might need be downloaded from a remote server. NESSI and EESSI use 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 the NESSI and EESSI

Getting support for NESSI and EESSI

For getting support for NESSI, please contact us via the standard NRIS support (support@nris.no).
For getting support for EESSI, please see https://www.eessi.io/docs/support/

In the future, we will add more information about:

Adding software installations to the shared software stacks provided by NESSI. For EESSI, see Adding software to EESSI.
Building and installing software packages on your local machine (HPC or other) on top of NESSI. For EESSI, see Building software on top of EESSI.
Getting access to NESSI on any machine (your own, in the Cloud, in CI, …). For EESSI, see Getting Access to EESSI.