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Flagship CernVM-FS repositories

Here we list a couple of flagship CernVM-FS repositories, all of which are publicly available.

LHC experiments

CernVM-FS repositories are used to distribute the software required to analyse the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at each of the LHC experiments.

Examples include (click to browse repository contents):

LCG Releases

The LCG Software Stack which is distributed via the CernVM-FS repository /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch contains over 450 external packages as well as HEP specific tools and generators.

There are usually two releases per year as well as development builds every night.

Software installations included often come with a script that updates your shell environment for using them by sourcing it. In addition, through so-called views a complete software stack can be made available in your shell environment.

For more information, see https://ep-dep-sft.web.cern.ch/document/lcg-releases and https://lcgdocs.web.cern.ch/lcgdocs/lcgreleases/introduction.

The Alliance

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada, a.k.a. The Alliance and formerly known as Compute Canada, uses CernVM-FS to distribute the software stack for the Canadian national compute clusters.

Documentation on using their CernVM-FS repository /cvmfs/soft.computecanada.ca is available here, and an overview of available software is available here.

Unpacked containers

CernVM-FS repositories can be used to provide an efficient way to access container images, by serving unpacked container images that can be consumed by container runtimes such as Apptainer.

Examples include:

More information on unpacked.cern.ch is available in the CernVM-FS documentation:

EESSI

The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) provides optimized installations of scientific software for x86_64 (Intel + AMD) and aarch64 (64-bit Arm) systems that work on any Linux distribution.

We will use EESSI as an example CernVM-FS repository throughout this tutorial.

(next: What is EESSI?)