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Update on EESSI in EuroHPC Federation Platform

Since our blog post in Feb'25 announcing that EESSI will be integrated in the EuroHPC Federation Platform (EFP), we have been working hard on making this a reality.

EFP Federated Software Catalog

The Federated Software Catalog (FSC) component of EFP will use EESSI as a base. As a result, EESSI will soon be available on all EuroHPC supercomputers.

In fact, EESSI is already available on the majority of them today!

EESSI as a base for the EFP Federated Software Catalog

The Federated Software Catalog component of EFP aims to provide a uniform software stack for end users across all EuroHPC supercomputers, with a focus on applications, tools, and libraries (not system software like Slurm, network or GPU drivers, etc.).

The goal is to alleviate some of the hurdles that researchers bump into when moving from one system to another, by providing the exact same software environment everywhere.

Does this ring a bell? It should!

EESSI, the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations, is the perfect base for the EFP Federated Software Catalog.

Not only will EESSI be available on all EuroHPC supercomputers, it lowers the barrier to entry to these systems because it is also available on various other HPC systems. This enables people to familiarize themselves with the software environment that will be available to them when they switch to a EuroHPC system.

EESSI can also easily be installed in on-premise or commercial cloud environments. As we saw in a recent blog post, EESSI can be used as a Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin which makes it an excellent fit for some of the technologies we are likely to see in EuroHPC AI Factories.

In addition, EESSI has further advantages from an end user perspective since it can also be used in CI environments like GitHub Actions, and on personal workstations running Linux, or even in Windows or macOS by using a Linux virtual machine.

This is why HPC team at Ghent University was invited to join the EFP consortium, which is led by CSC - IT Center for Science: to help with integrating EESSI into the EuroHPC Federation Platform.

Deep integration in EFP

EESSI is the base for the EFP Federated Software Catalog, but it is also being deeply integrated into several other EFP components.

The MyEFP user portal will provide an overview of software that is available in the Federated Software Catalog, specifically in the context of EuroHPC infrastructure. It will map the CPU and GPU targets that EESSI supports to partitions of the EuroHPC supercomputers, so that researchers can easily tell on which systems optimized installations of the software they would like to use are already available.

Additionally, the EFP Interactive component that consists of a federated instance of Open OnDemand managed by the EFP consortium will rely on EESSI for the various interactive apps it provides. This includes for example Jupyter, RStudio, MLflow, and even a Linux desktop environment in which GUI applications like ParaView can be run.

ParaView in desktop session via EFP Interactive

EESSI will effectively enable researchers to write portable (Slurm) job scripts that work across EuroHPC supercomputers, as well as efficiently run entire workflows via the EFP Workflows component that is based on LEXIS. These workflows may be executed not just within a single system, but even across multiple systems.

Much of this is facilitated by the central internal API that is provided by the EFP Allocations component (based on Waldur), which allows other EFP components to query the contents of Federated Software Catalog by providing an API that leverages the publicly available EESSI data files.

Current availability of EESSI on EuroHPC supercomputers

EESSI is already available on 7 out of 9 of current EuroHPC supercomputers.

This includes, in alphabetical order:

We are currently working closely together with CSC – IT Center for Science to make EESSI available on LUMI, and with Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) to do the same on JUPITER.

Webinars

A series of webinars introducing the EuroHPC Federation Platform have been organised recently, with more coming up soon; see https://my-eurohpc.eu/training.

The recordings of the first three webinars are embedded below, along with a link to the slides.

Introduction to EFP

On 4 February 2026, a general introduction to the EuroHPC Federation Platform was presented by CSC. It outlines the overall scope of the project, and briefly covers the role of each of its components.

Over 250 people attended this webinar, confirming the broad interest from the EuroHPC community.

The slides for this webinar are available here.

EFP Federated Software Catalog

On 25 February 2026, we presented the Federated Software Catalog in the 2nd EFP webinar.

We covered the role of EESSI as its base, gave a quick introduction to EESSI itself, and provided a high-level overview of the software installations that are already provided by EESSI.

A quick demo with running GROMACS using the exact same job script on the EuroHPC supercomputers Vega and Deucalion helped to convey to attendees how this could positively impact their daily workflow.

The 100+ attendees of this webinar raised a variety of interesting questions, most of which were answered during the Q&A at the end.

The slides for this webinar are available here.

EFP Interactive

On 4 March 2026, the EFP Interactive component was covered in depth in a 3rd webinar.

It showed how the Federated Software Catalog based on EESSI powers various interactive apps, and included a live demo of the main features of this federated Open OnDemand instance.

During Q&A, questions by the numerous (160+) attendees were answered.

The slides for this webinar are available here.

Next steps

Over the next couple of weeks and months, we will keep collaborating with the EuroHPC Hosting Entities to stabilize the deployments of EESSI on the EuroHPC supercomputers, and get EESSI onboarded on the upcoming systems, like Arrhenius in Sweden, DAEDALUS in Greece, and Alice Recoque in France.

In addition, we will provide concise but thorough documentation on the use of EESSI on the EuroHPC supercomputers, and provide support to researchers who rely on it for their EuroHPC projects.

The first version of the EuroHPC Federation Platform will become available soon: it is planned to be production-ready by end of March 2026. By then, EESSI should be available on all current EuroHPC supercomputers.

People who have questions related to the Federated Software Catalog of the EuroHPC Federation Platform should contact the EFP Helpdesk via helpdesk (at) my-eurohpc.eu.