Events

About the talk: 

Maintaining a collection of software installations for a diverse user base can be a tedious, repetitive, error-prone, and time-consuming task. Because most end-user software packages for an HPC environment are not readily available in existing OS package managers, they require significant extra effort from the user support team.

In this presentation we present EasyBuild (https://easybuild.io), a software installation framework written in Python that aims to support the various installation procedures used by the vast collection of software packages that are typically installed in an HPC environment.
It is built on top of existing tools, provides support for well- established installation procedures, and makes sharing implementations of installation procedures very easy. Installing software packages that are supported can be done by issuing a single command, even if dependencies are not installed yet. Hence, it simplifies the task of HPC site support teams, and even allows end-users to keep their software installations consistent and up to date.

We will also show how you can build and install software with EasyBuild on top of EESSI, the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, https://eessi.io).

About the speakers:

Kenneth Hoste

Kenneth Hoste holds a Masters (2005) and PhD (2010) in Computer Science from Ghent University (Belgium). His dissertation topic was “Analysis, Estimation and Optimization of Computer System Performance Using Machine Learning”. Since October 2010, he is a member of the HPC team at Ghent University where he is mainly responsible for user support & training. He is the lead developer of EasyBuild since 2011, a software build and installation framework for (scientific) software on HPC systems, an active contributor in the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) project since 2020, and a partner in the MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence since 2023. He enjoys (co-)organizing workshops and meetups, like the EasyBuild User Meetings (yearly since 2016) and the HPC, Big Data, and Data Science devroom at FOSDEM (since 2014).

Pedro Santos Neves

Pedro Santos Neves joined the HPC team at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) in 2023. While his role focuses on user support, training, and development he is also a contributor to the EESSI project and the MultiXscale EuroHPC Center of Excellence.  Previously, he worked as a scientific programmer at the the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, where he helped researchers design, develop, and maintain scientific software. His background is in Evolutionary Biology in which he holds a Master’s degree (University of Lisbon, 2016) and PhD (University of Groningen, 2024). His doctoral research revolved around the use and development of stochastic models of island community evolution.

Caspar van Leeuwen

Caspar van Leeuwen holds a PhD (2017) in Medical Physics from the Amsterdam UMC. After his PhD, he joined the HPC team at SURF, which hosts the Dutch National Supercomputer. There, he was responsible for managing the software environment for several years. Since 2020, he is an EasyBuild maintainer and an active contributor in the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) project. Since 2023, he leads one of the work packages of the MultiXscale EuroHPC Center-of-Excellence.