Inspiration for EESSI¶
The EESSI concept is heavily inspired by software stack provided by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (a.k.a. The Alliance, formerly known as Compute Canada), which is a shared software stack used on all national host sites for Advanced Research Computing in Canada that is distributed across Canada (and beyond) using CernVM-FS; see also here.
EESSI is significantly more ambitious in its goals however, in various ways.
It intends to support a broader range of system architectures than what is currently supported by the Compute Canada software stack, like Arm 64-bit microprocessors, accelerators beyond NVIDIA GPUs, etc.
In addition, EESSI is set up to be a community project, by setting up services and infrastructure to automate the software build and installation process as much as possible, providing extensive documentation and support to end users, user support teams, and system administrators who want to employ EESSI, and allowing contributors to propose additions to the software stack.
The design of the Compute Canada software stack is discussed in detail in the PEARC'19 paper "Providing a Unified Software Environment for Canada’s National Advanced Computing Centers".
It has also been presented at the 5th EasyBuild User Meeting, see slides and talk recording.
More information on the Compute Canada software stack is available in their documentation, and in their overview of available software.
(next: High-level Overview of EESSI)