@article{be626d3473eb4ca993cce76a421b22b6,
title = "EESSI: A cross-platform ready-to-use optimised scientific software stack",
abstract = "Getting scientific software installed correctly and ensuring it performs well has been a ubiquitous problem for several decades now, which is compounded currently by the changing landscape of computational science with the (re-)emergence of different microprocessor families, and the expansion to additional scientific domains like artificial intelligence and next-generation sequencing. The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) project aims to provide a ready-to-use stack of scientific software installations that can be leveraged easily on a variety of platforms, ranging from personal workstations to cloud environments and supercomputer infrastructure, without making compromises with respect to performance. In this article, we provide a detailed overview of the project, highlight potential use cases, and demonstrate that the performance of the provided scientific software installations can be competitive with system-specific installations.",
keywords = "high-performance computing, scientific software, supercomputing",
author = "Bob Dr{\"o}ge and {Holanda Rusu}, Victor and Kenneth Hoste and {van Leeuwen}, Caspar and Alan O'Cais and Thomas R{\"o}blitz",
note = "Funding Information: We would like to thank the many different partners that have supported the EESSI project so far: Dell Technologies for bringing together the university partners that kick-started the project; Ghent University in Belgium, the J{\"u}lich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, the NESSI project partners in Norway including the University of Oslo and the University of Bergen, the University of Groningen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the SURF consortium in the Netherlands for their significant contributions in the development and testing of the proof-of-concept pilot repository; the HPC.NRW competence network in Germany for their feedback and contributions; Compute Canada for the extensive technical discussions providing insight and sharing expertise related to their unified software environment; Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure for supporting the project by providing sponsored credits in their cloud environments to facilitate development, training and demonstration activities in EESSI; the Fenix Research Infrastructure project for providing cloud resources; the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL) for providing access to POWER9 resources. In addition, we would like to thank Adam Huffman for proofreading this article and providing valuable feedback, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and constructive reviews, which have resulted in a much improved article. We acknowledge PRACE for awarding access to the Fenix Infrastructure resources, which are partially funded from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme through the ICEI project under the grant agreement No. 800858. Alan O'Cais acknowledges support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under grant agreement No. 676531 (project E-CAM). Finally, we would like to thank the developers and user communities of the various open source software projects that we use in the EESSI project, including (but not limited to) CernVM-FS, Gentoo Prefix, EasyBuild, Lmod, archspec, Singularity, ReFrame, Cluster-in-the-Cloud, Magic Castle, Ansible, and Terraform. We look forward to keep on working together with these projects and their respective communities, and contributing back bug fixes, additional features, and other enhancements. Funding Information: We acknowledge PRACE for awarding access to the Fenix Infrastructure resources, which are partially funded from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme through the ICEI project under the grant agreement No. 800858. Alan O'Cais acknowledges support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under grant agreement No. 676531 (project E‐CAM). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2022 The Authors. Software: Practice and Experience published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.",
year = "2023",
month = jan,
doi = "10.1002/spe.3075",
language = "English",
volume = "53",
pages = "176--210",
journal = "Software - Practice and Experience",
issn = "0038-0644",
publisher = "Wiley",
number = "1",
}