Keeping the P in HPC: the EESSI Way

In scientific computing on supercomputers, performance should be king. Today’s rapidly diversifying High-Performance Computing (HPC) landscape makes this increasingly difficult to achieve however...

Modern supercomputers rely heavily on open source software, from a Linux-based operating system to scientific applications and their vast dependency stacks. A decade ago, HPC systems were relatively homogeneous: Intel CPUs, a fast interconnect like Infininand, and a shared filesystem. Today, diversity is the norm: AMD and Intel CPUs, emerging Arm-based exascale systems like JUPITER, widespread acceleration with NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, soon also RISC-V system architectures (like Tenstorrent), etc.

This hardware fragmentation creates significant challenges for researchers and HPC support teams. Getting scientific software installed reliably and efficiently is more painful than ever, and that’s before even considering software performance.

Containers, once heralded as the solution for mobility-of-compute, are increasingly showing their limits. An x86_64 container image is useless on a system with Arm CPUs, and will be equally useless on RISC-V in the not so distant future. What's worse is that portable container images used today already sacrifice performance by avoiding CPU-specific instructions like AVX-512 or AVX10, potentially leaving substantial performance gains on the table. Containerization also complicates MPI-heavy workloads and introduces friction for HPC users.

This talk introduces the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI), which tackles these challenges head-on with a fundamentally different approach. EESSI is a curated, performance-optimized scientific software stack powered by open source technologies including CernVM-FS, Gentoo Prefix, EasyBuild, Lmod, Magic Castle, ReFrame, etc.

We will show how EESSI enables researchers to use the same optimized software stack seamlessly across laptops, cloud VMs, supercomputers, CI pipelines, and even Raspberry Pis—without sacrificing performance or ignoring hardware differences. This unlocks powerful workflows and simplifies software management across heterogeneous environments.

EESSI is already being adopted across European supercomputers and plays a central role in the upcoming EuroHPC Federation Platform.

Come learn why EESSI is the right way to keep the P in HPC.