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Motivation & Goals of EESSI

Motivation

EESSI is motivated by the observation that the landscape of computational science is changing in various ways, including:

  • Increasing diversity in system architectures: additional families of general-purpose microprocessors including Arm 64-bit (aarch64) and RISC-V on top of the well-established Intel and AMD processors (both x86_64), and different types of GPUS (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel);
  • Rapid expansion of computational science beyond traditional domains like physics and computational chemistry, including bioinformatis, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), etc., which leads to a significant growth of the software stack that is used for running scientific workloads;
  • Emergence of commercial cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, ...) that has competitive advantages over on-premise infrastructure for computational workloads, such as near-instant availability, increased flexibility, a broader variety of hardware platforms, and faster access to new generations of microprocessors;
  • Limited manpower that is available in the HPC user support teams that are responsible for helping scientists with running the software they require on high-end (and complex) infrastructure like supercomputers (and beyond);

Collectively, these indicate that there is a strong need for more collaboration on building and installing scientific software to avoid duplicate work across computational scientists and HPC user support teams.

Goals

The main goal of EESSI is to provide a collection of scientific software installations that work across a wide range of different platforms, including HPC clusters, cloud infrastructure, and personal workstations and laptops, without making compromises on the performance of that software.

While initially the focus of EESSI is to support Linux systems with established system architectures like AMD + Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs, the ambition is to also cover emerging technologies like Arm 64-bit CPUs, other accelerators like the AMD Instinct and Intel Xe, and eventually also RISC-V microprocessors.

The software installations included in EESSI are optimized for specific generations of microprocessors by targeting a variety of instruction set architectures (ISAs), like for example Intel and AMD processors supporting the AVX2 or AVX-512 instructions, and Arm processors that support SVE instructions.

(next: Inspiration for EESSI)