2025-05-20 –, On Air
Modern research often requires cloud or supercomputing infrastructure, but setting up your software environment on such systems can be challenging and time consuming. What if you could have the same software environment everywhere?
The European Environment for Scientific Software installations (EESSI) provides a large, uniform stack of scientific software, ready to use on virtually any system in the world: from personal laptop, to a cloud VM, to the largest supercomputers in Europe.
In this talk, you will learn how EESSI works, what possibilities it creates, and you will see it live in action.
Installing scientific software on complex systems such as cloud VMs or a supercomputer can be a time-consuming hurdle, and may even discourage you from using the infrastructure that would - in theory - be most suitable for your work. It also means that, when you are set up on a system, you are unlikely to move anywhere else, even if better infrastructures become available.
The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) is an open-source project that provides a large stack of scientific software, which can be easily made available on any system in the world. This allows you to start experimenting on a local laptop, and then seamlessly move to a cloud VM or supercomputer as your computational needs increase.
Aside from alleviating the software installation burden, having the same software environment everywhere opens up many more unique opportunities. In this session we will show some examples, but also open the floor for informal discussion: which opportunities do you see?
Bob Dröge has been working as an HPC expert at the University of Groningen since 2011. He is passionate about solving complex issues, helping out other people, and making complex tasks easier, which come in useful in his role to provide user support and training to the users of the university's HPC facilities. He is also the work package lead for the Dutch Science Data Centre infrastructure as part of ESA's Euclid space mission, one of the founders of and very actively involved in the EESSI project, and a project partner in the MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre of Excellence.