One-pager for AWS (202509)

# One-pager for AWS (202509) The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, pronounced as "easy", https://eessi.io) is a collaboration between different HPC sites and industry partners, with the common goal to set up a shared repository of scientific software installations that can be used on a variety of systems, regardless of which flavor/version of Linux distribution or processor architecture is used, or whether it is a full-size supercomputer, a (cluster of) virtual machine(s) in the cloud, or a personal workstation. The project was started early 2020 as a grass-roots collaboration that grew from the EasyBuild community. EasyBuild (https://easybuild.io) is a software installation tool that focuses on facilitating the installation of scientific software (from source) on High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. EESSI uses various well-established open source projects next to EasyBuild, including: - CernVM-FS (https://cernvm.cern.ch/fs) for world-wide on-demand "streaming" the software installations provided by EESSI; - Lmod (https://lmod.readthedocs.io) as environment modules tool; - Gentoo Prefix (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix) for the EESSI compatibility layer, providing a container-like host isolation mechanism, without actually relying on a container runtime service; - Magic Castle (https://github.com/ComputeCanada/magic_castle) to spin up Slurm clusters on cloud infrastructure like AWS; - ReFrame (https://reframe-hpc.readthedocs.io) for software testing, ... In February 2022, an open-access paper that outlines the goals and design of EESSI was published (https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3075). The development of EESSI is currently funded through the MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence (https://multixscale.eu, 2023-2026). EESSI has seen extensive adoption in the European HPC community, as well as beyond it. It is available on dozens of systems throughout Europe, including flagship EuroHPC systems like Karolina, Vega, Deucalion, and MareNostrum 5. For an up-to-date list of (known) systems where EESSI is available, see https://eessi.io/docs/systems/. At the Supercomputing 2024 conference, EESSI was awarded with the HPCWire Readers' Choice Award for "Best HPC Programming Tool or Technology" (https://www.eessi.io/docs/blog/2024/11/18/hpcwire-readers-choice-awards-2024-for-eessi/). EESSI is being integrated as the Federated Software Stack component of the EuroHPC Federation Platform (EFP). Active development of EFP started in January 2025, and should complete by end of 2029. A high-level overview of the goals of this EuroHPC-funded project was presented at the FOSDEM 2025 open source event (https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6718-eurohpc-fp-a-federated-platform-for-hpc-infrastructure-in-europe-built-with-open-source-software/). In the last couple of years, the active development of EESSI has resulted in extensive growth and adoption. The production CernVM-FS repository of EESSI (`software.eessi.io`) provides optimized binaries for 13 `x86_64`+ Arm CPU microarchitectures (https://www.eessi.io/docs/software_layer/cpu_targets/), including AWS Graviton. As of August 2025, this collectively adds up to over 10,000 software installations, and covers over 500 unique open source software projects, along with over a thousand additional "extensions" (Python packages, R libraries, etc.). The sponsored credits that AWS has been provided to the EESSI community to efficiently develop and extend the set of provided software installations has been particularly instrumental for this. Going forward, EESSI intends to further extend the set of provided software installations, covering additional software applications/tools/libraries, providing updates for already supported software packages, and extending the range of supported CPU microarchitectures. In addition, a broad range of CPU + NVIDIA GPU combinations will be supported (https://www.eessi.io/docs/software_layer/gpu_targets/), and support for the AMD ROCm ecosystem will be added (https://www.eessi.io/docs/blog/2025/08/07/rocm/).