This year's FOSDEM exceeded all expectations a first-time attendee like me could have. Filled with interesting talks, wide range of diverse people and impactful projects, I bring back home a bag full of stickers, lovely memories and some Belgian chocolates.
EESSI provides a rich set of software installations, which were built and installed using EasyBuild.
Can we convince Spack to reuse software installed in EESSI, and by doing so make EESSI more attractive to those of you who prefer using Spack over EasyBuild?
Several people have expressed interest in exposing the software installations provided by EESSI to Spack, so they can be used as dependencies when building and installing software with Spack.
Recently, we have explored how this could be achieved through a proof-of-concept with QuantumESPRESSO.
The goal here is to build and install only QuantumESPRESSO with Spack, and leveraging software installations from EESSI for all required dependencies, including the compiler and libraries for MPI, BLAS/LAPACK, FFTW, etc.
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source container orchestration platform widely used for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Normally, deploying a specific application on Kubernetes requires preparing a container image including the target software and all its dependencies. Furthermore, the software should be optimized depending on the target hardware architecture to achieve the best performance, which could prove particularly challenging especially on heterogeneous systems. Implementing an integration of EESSI with Kubernetes will allow the many sites and enterprises that already use K8s to more easily get access to a wide variety of optimized software installations.
In this blog post, we present a proof of concept (PoC) for deploying EESSI on a Kubernetes cluster.
In a previous blog post, “An example CI workflow that leverages EESSI CI tools”, Pedro Santos Neves explained how to set up a GitLab CI workflow. This post will focus on GitHub CI workflows and show how to access the development repository of EESSI.
High-performance computing environments are constantly evolving, and keeping pace with the latest interconnect technologies is crucial for maximising application performance. However, we cannot rebuild all the software in EESSI that depends on improvements to communication libraries. So how do we take advantage of new technological developments?
Specifically we look at taking benefit of the HPE/Cray Slingshot-11. Slingshot-11 promises to offer a significant advancement in HPC networking, offering improved bandwidth, lower latency, and better scalability for exascale computing workloads ... so this should be worth the effort!
In this blog post, we present the requirements for building OpenMPI 5.x with Slingshot-11 support on HPE/Cray systems and its integration with EESSI using the host_injections mechanism of EESSI to inject custom-built OpenMPI libraries. This approach enables overriding EESSI’s default MPI library with an ABI-compatible, Slingshot-optimized version which should give us optimal performance.
EESSI has recently been working together with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to provide easy access to EESSI for those using EOSC compute resources.
A first implementation of EESSI support is now available as the EESSI Compute Node tool in the EOSC EU Node Tools Hub.
The EuroHPC User Days 2025, which took place in Copenhagen (Denmark) was a great event to connect with the EuroHPC community.
Several members of the EESSI community participated, and we also organised an EESSI CI/CD hackathon directly afterwards on Thu 2 Oct 2025.
The plenary sessions of the EuroHPC User Days 2025 featured representatives of both the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) and the EuroHPC community talking about current and upcoming activities.
Recordings of the plenary sessions are available: day 1, day 2.
The EuroHPC Federation Platform (EFP) was highlighted during the presentation on the EuroHPC supercomputer infrastructure:
The first version of the EuroHPC Federation Platform will be available in March 2026, and will include EESSI as the base for the Federated Software Catalogue (FSC) component.
See also our previous blog post on how EESSI will be integrated in the EuroHPC Federation Platform.
The networking sessions were of particular interest to us, since they allowed us to discuss EESSI and related topics with a various people from the EuroHPC Community.
Somewhat unexpectedly a stand was available during the Meet & Greet networking session for EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence (CoE) projects. We took the opportunity as representatives of the MultiXscale to set up an improved info stand, where we also did live hands-on demos with EESSI.
During the networking sessions we engaged with various EuroHPC Hosting Entities, either about their experience with making EESSI available on the EuroHPC supercomputers they operate, or about their ongoing efforts to make EESSI available soon.
Next to attending the two-day EuroHPC User Days event we also organised an EESSI CI/CD hackathon at the same venue the day after, in collaboration with MultiXscale, CASTIEL2, NCC Denmark, and the Danish e-infrastructure Consortium (DeiC).
Initially we were a bit unsure whether or not this would attract enough interest, but in the end we filled all available seats for in-person attendees, and also had a bunch of remote attendees who followed via Zoom.
The hackathon started with a presentation by Alan O'Cais outlining how EESSI can be leveraged for Continunous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD).
Presentation materials are available here.
During the hands-on session participants could "pick their own adventure", and decide for themselves whether they wanted to explore using EESSI in GitHub Actions or take up another challenge. Several members of the EESSI core team were available to answer questions and provide hands-on help to hackathon participants.
All in-person attendees received a free EESSI coffee mug as a token of appreciation for their participation in the hackathon.
The hackathon featured a Raspberry Pi starter kit prize, sponsored by Do IT Now, which was granted to the participant who made the most impressive progress during the hackathon.
More information on the EESSI CI/CD hackathon that was held in conjunction with the EuroHPC User Days 2025 is available here.
We hope to organise more sessions like this in the future!
Following our previous posts on mapping the ROCm ecosystem and building ROCm support in EESSI, we're excited to share a significant milestone in our ROCm integration journey. Our core ROCm components are now hardware-validated and nearly ready for inclusion in EasyBuild, marking substantial progress toward making AMD GPU computing more accessible through EESSI.
Following our overview of the ROCm ecosystem, we're excited to share our progress on the next phase of our ROCm initiative: actually building and integrating ROCm support into EESSI. This work represents a significant step forward in making AMD GPU computing more accessible to the scientific computing community through our software stack.
Within the EESSI community and Inuits, we're excited to share our latest contribution to the scientific computing community: a high-level overview of AMD's ROCm ecosystem. This document is the result of our recent efforts to prepare for adding ROCm support to EESSI, and we believe it will serve as a valuable resource for anyone working with AMD GPUs in scientific computing environments.
The full overview document can be found at Overview of ROCm Ecosystem.