# Lmod grant

- deadline Mon 10 Oct
- max. 2 pages (letterhead)
- why is Lmod so cool/important
- key component in HPC infrastructure
- part of VSC
- history of EasyBuild & Lmod
- Lmod is default modules tool since ...
- how big is EB (worldwide, doc visits, PyPI downloads)
- EESSI is coming & funded
- involvement with Lmod community since 2015 (discussions, contributions, ...)

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LETTER OF COLLABORATION FOR LMOD POSE GRANT PROPOSAL

Belgium, 05 Oct. 2022

To whom it may concern,

With this letter of collaboration we would like to express our strong support for the POSE grant proposal for the Lmod project.

<<< Lmod has grown out to be an indispensable tool for the HPC community, since it allows to provide end users of HPC infrastructure a user-friendly and consistent view on the (scientific) software stack that is made available and managed by the HPC support team.
>>> Lmod has grown out to be an indispensable tool for the HPC community, playing a key role at the frontline of the end users' experience in the HPC infrastructure. Lmod provides user-friendly tools to load (scientific) software on-demand and search the vast software library that is made available and managed by the HPC support team.

<<< It is of vital importance for the computational science community that Lmod is further developed and actively maintained as an open source project, and that the Lmod community continues to thrive through an active mailing list and monthly virtual community meetings, so that help can be provided in case questions or problems are being raised.
>>> It is of vital importance for the computational science community that Lmod is further developed and actively maintained as an open source project to sustain its reliability and continue improving its adoption. One of our priorities is that the Lmod community continues to thrive through its active mailing list and monthly virtual community meetings, so that help can be provided in case questions or problems are being raised.

Lmod is also a critical component in other projects, in particular EasyBuild and EESSI.

EasyBuild (https://easybuild.io) is a software build and installation framework that allows you to manage a central (scientific) software stack on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems in an efficient way. It used used by 100s of HPC sites around the world, and receives over 3,000 contributions (in the form of pull requests in its GitHub repositories) per year, by over 300 unique contributors to date.
An environment modules tool is a strict requirement for EasyBuild. Lmod can be used as a modules tool in EasyBuild since 2013, and is the default modules tool used by EasyBuild since November 2016. Recent user surveys in the EasyBuild community show that Lmod is by far the most popular environment modules tool in the EasyBuild community, with about 80% of EasyBuild users using Lmod.

The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, https://github.com/EESSI) is a project with as goal to build a common stack of scientific software installations for HPC systems and beyond, including laptops, personal workstations and cloud infrastructure. It is leveraging both EasyBuild and Lmod as tools to archieve this goal, among various other open source projects.

The VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Centre) is a virtual collaboration between all the Flemish universities to offer HPC services to the Flemish research community. Lmod is the tool of choice on all VSC compute clusters for offering user-friendly access to the central software stack to its users, due its flexibility and the active development. The writers of this letter are all members of the VSC.

>>> We have made active contributions to Lmod in various ways since 2015, including:
>>> - Adding a script to facilitate updating the Lmod spider cache;
>>> - Adding a new Lmod hooks to control the visibility of modules named `isVisible()`;
>>> - Attending the virtual Lmod monthly community meetings and help with writing the meeting notes;
>>> - Activitly participating on the Lmod mailing list and the Lmod GitHub repository, by answering questions and joining discussions;
>>> - Adding a GitHub Actions workflow to automate CI testing of Lmod;
>>> - Sharing all our site-specific customisations to Lmod in a public GitHub repository;
>>> - Hosting Robert McLay, the lead developer of Lmod, to present recent developments in Lmod on various occasions, for example during the EasyBuild User Meeting.

We are committed to keep contributing to the Lmod project and community in the future.

We feel that it is of critical importance that the Lmod project not only is further actively developed, maintained, and supported, but also that the broader Lmod community is engaged more closely in these activities.
The requested POSE grant for Lmod will no doubt help to enable this going forward.

We are happy to further motivate our support for the Lmod project should the need arise.

Kind regards,

Kenneth Hoste, HPC system administrator at Ghent University + EasyBuild lead developer
Ward Poelmans, HPC team lead at Vrije Universiteit Brussel + EasyBuild maintainer