On 18 March 2025 Christian Bustelo and Arturo Gimeno from Do IT Now showed to the attendees of the GOOD conference what EESSI is about and their preliminary work in integrating it in Open OnDemand.
"How long until I can run my simulation?"
It's the question every computational scientist asks when setting up a new environment. With GPU-accelerated EESSI, the answer might surprise you: as little as 15 seconds from login to launching your first computation.
In the high-stakes world of scientific computing, every minute spent configuring software is a minute not spent on discovery. That's why we've developed a metric we call Mean-Time-To-Science – the total time from system access to running your first scientific computation. By optimizing this crucial metric, EESSI's GPU support transforms the traditional hours-long setup process into a seamless experience that keeps researchers focused on their science.
Although EESSI aims to provide pre-built software for all common HPC architectures, GPU support introduces multiplicative requirements for software builds. Each GPU compute capability (e.g., CC7.5, CC8.0, CC8.6) needs to be combined with each CPU architecture (zen2, zen3, generic x86_64), creating a large matrix of possible configurations. While it's possible to pre-build all software for all CPU/GPU combinations, testing all the configurations is not - the combination of CPU/GPU might not even exist in the real-world.
To address this challenge, we're developing additional documentation highlighting which CPU/GPU combinations are already built into EESSI. Additionally, we provide the tools and process for users to build any EasyBuild-enabled software on EESSI, allowing them to create architecture-specific builds for their particular needs when a specific combination isn't available in the standard distribution.
A couple of weeks ago the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) announced the consortium that will develop the EuroHPC Federation Platform (EFP).
This ambitious effort will deliver a 'one-stop shop' for researchers using the EuroHPC supercomputers, as well as the upcoming EuroHPC AI Factories and quantum computers, built with open source software.
Ghent University is part of this consortium to integrate EESSI into the EuroHPC Federation Platform as common software stack.
Henrik Nortamo (CSC), the technical lead of the EFP consortium, gave an excellent 20-minute talk on EFP last weekend in the 10th HPC, Big Data, and Data Science devroom at FOSDEM'25 in Brussels. Slides and recording of the talk are available here.
We are thrilled to announce that EESSI has won an HPCWire Reader's Choice Award!
We had a great time at the EuroHPC User Day 2024 in Amsterdam earlier this week.
Both MultiXscale and EESSI were strongly represented, and the work we have been doing was clearly being appreciated.
EESSI's CI workflows are available on GitHub Actions and as a GitLab CI/CD component. Enabling this is as simple as adding EESSI's CI to your workflow of choice, giving you access to the entire EESSI software stack optimized for the relevant CPU architecture(s) in your runner's environment. If you are developing an application on top of the EESSI software stack, for example, this means you don't need to invest heavily in configuring and maintaining a CI setup: EESSI does that for you so you can focus on your code. With the EESSI CI workflows you don't have to worry about figuring out how to optimize build and runtime dependencies as these will be streamed seamlessly to your runner's environment.
EESSI has been nominated for the HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards 2024, in the "Best HPC Programming Tool or Technology" category.
You can help us win the award by joining the vote.
To vote, you should:
Done button.Note that you are not required to vote for all categories, you can opt for only voting for one particular nominee in only one of the categories.
For example, you could vote for European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) in category 13: Best HPC Programming Tool or Technology.
Thanks to the work developed under MultiXscale CoE we are proud to announce that as of 22 July 2024, Extrae v4.2.0 is available in the EESSI production repository software.eessi.io,
optimized for the 8 CPU targets that are fully supported by version 2023.06 of EESSI.
This allows using Extrae effortlessly on the EuroHPC systems where EESSI is already available,
like Vega and Karolina.
It is worth noting that from that date Extrae is also available in the EESSI RISC-V repository risv.eessi.io.
Since 14 June 2024, ESPResSo v4.2.2 is available in the EESSI production repository software.eessi.io,
optimized for the 8 CPU targets that are fully supported by version 2023.06 of EESSI.
This allows running ESPResSo effortlessly on the EuroHPC systems where EESSI is already available,
like Vega and Karolina.
On 27 June 2024, an additional installation of ESPResSo v4.2.2 that is optimized for Arm A64FX processors was added, which enables also running ESPResSo efficiently on Deucalion, even though EESSI is not available yet system-wide on Deucalion (see below for more details).
With the portable test for ESPResSo that is available in the EESSI test suite we can easily evaluate the scalability of ESPResSo across EuroHPC systems, even if those systems have different system architectures.
This week, we had the privilege of attending the ISC'24 conference in the beautiful city of Hamburg, Germany. This was an excellent opportunity for us to showcase EESSI, and gain valuable insights and feedback from the HPC community.