EESSI - A streamed, production-quality, multi-platform HPC software stack
EESSI: A streamed, production-quality, multi-platform HPC software stack
Dr. Alan O’Cais and Kenneth Hoste
Wednesday, January 25 at 10:00 AM ET.
Abstract
The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations EESSI project aims to provide a ready-to-use stack of production-quality 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. Unlike containers, it exists natively on the host system with direct access to hardware and can be remotely updated (for bug fixes, security, etc.).
From an education perspective, it is an exciting prospect as it provides a consistent user experience across all platforms which is quickly reproducible by learners on the systems they have access to. For course providers it has the potential to provide a common layer that can be leveraged in other tools (such as Magic Castle, which can deploy Slurm clusters in a wide range of cloud providers) and to collaboratively develop training content (such as that developed by HPC Carpentry.
Presenter Bios
*Dr. Alan O’Cais
Dr. Alan O’Cais is currently the Technical Manager of MultiXscale, a EuroHPC Centre of Excellence. From 2016 to 2021, he was Software Manager of E-CAM, an EU Centre of Excellence in computing applications. Between 2010 and 2015 he was primarily focussed within the EU-funded LinkSCEEM-2 project helping to develop a Virtual Research Community for Computational Science in the Eastern Mediterranean region. He received Masters Degree in High Performance Computing in 2002 and a PhD in Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics in 2005. He currently works for CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) at the University of Barcelona, having worked at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre from 2010 to 2021.
Kenneth Hoste
Kenneth Hoste holds a Masters (2005) and PhD (2010) in Computer Science from Ghent University (Belgium). His dissertation topic was “Analysis, Estimation and Optimization of Computer System Performance Using Machine Learning”. Since October 2010, he is a member of the HPC team at Ghent University where he is mainly responsible for user support & training. As a part of his job, he is also the lead developer of EasyBuild, a software build and installation framework for (scientific) software on HPC systems. He enjoys (co-)organizing workshops and meetups, like the EasyBuild User Meetings (yearly since 2016) and the HPC, Big Data & Data Science devroom at FOSDEM (since 2014).