meeting 2025 11 06 - EESSI/meetings GitHub Wiki

Notes for 2025-11-06 meeting

  • date & time: Thu 6 Nov 2025 - 14:00 CET (13:00 UTC)
    • (every first Thursday of every other month (odd months))
  • venue: (online, see mail for meeting link, or ask in Slack)
  • Agenda:
    • Quick introduction by new people
    • Progress update per EESSI layer
    • Update on EESSI production repository software.eessi.io
    • Modulefile for initializing the EESSI stack
    • Update on EESSI documentation + test suite + build-and-deploy bot
    • AWS/Azure sponsorship update
    • Upcoming/recent events
    • Q&A

Slides

Meeting notes

(by Bob/Kenneth)

Quick introduction by new people

  • Renato Alves (EMBL)

Progress update per EESSI layer

Filesystem layer

(see slides)

  • Kenneth: feature is being implemented in CernVM-FS to provide support for partially mirroring CernVM-FS repositories
    • for example ignore aarch64 parts of EESSI repository
  • Richard: exporting EESSI through NFS for just 2 CPU architectures => already requires over 1TB
    • compared to ~600GB for a full Stratum-1 mirror, thanks to compression & deduplication done by CernVM-FS
Compatibility layer

(see slides)

  • revising strategy for symlinking NVIDIA GPU drivers, only relevant for EESSI version 2025.06 (not 2023.06)
Software layer

(see slides)

  • Alan has been focusing on installing additional software in EESSI 2025.06 w.r.t. remote desktop environments
  • docs should be updated to mention A64FX as supported CPU target
    • and make it clear that no GPU installations will be provided for A64FX

software.eessi.io repository

(see slides)

  • zen5 (AMD Turin) and Graviton 4 will probably be added to supported EESSI 2025.06 CPU targets
  • 2025.06 module is still hidden
  • (Alan) no easy way to search across EESSI versions
    • may need to construct top-level spider cache "manually" for that

Make Spack aware of software installed in EESSI

(see slides)

  • milestone of being able to build QuantumESPRESSO with with Spack using all dependencies coming from EESSI is probably worth a blog post?
  • follow-up meeting with Todd Gamblin to figure out next steps, get feedback

Build-and-deploy bot

(see slides)

  • also building for Zen5 is possible, but we would need to spin up a new build cluster in a different Slurm region
    • we could use this as an opportunity to migrate current AWS build cluster to a new setup

EESSI documentation

(see slides)

  • ...

EESSI test suite

(see slides)

  • ...

AWS/Azure sponsored credits

(see slides)

  • refresh of AWS credits for 2026 hopefully coming soon

Events

(see slides)

  • Caspar will also be giving a presentation at the Dutch RSE Day event

Frequency of EESSI update meeting

  • ...

Q&A

  • (Davide) early status update on EESSI on Android