EESSI promo tour @ ISC'24 (May 2024, Hamburg)¶
This week, we had the privilege of attending the ISC'24 conference in the beautiful city of Hamburg, Germany. This was an excellent opportunity for us to showcase EESSI, and gain valuable insights and feedback from the HPC community.
BoF session on EESSI¶
The EESSI Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session on Tuesday morning, part of the official ISC'24 program, was the highlight of our activities in Hamburg.
It was well attended, with well over 100 people joining us at 9am.
During this session, we introduced the EESSI project with a short presentation, followed by a well-received live hands-on demo of installing and using EESSI by spinning up an "empty" Linux virtual machine instance in Amazon EC2 and getting optimized installations of popular scientific applications like GROMACS and TensorFlow running in a matter of minutes.
During the second part of the BoF session, we engaged with the audience through an interactive poll and by letting attendees ask questions.
The presentation slides, including the results of the interactive poll and questions that were raised by attendees, are available here.
Workshops¶
During the last day of ISC'24, EESSI was present in no less than three different workshops.
RISC-V workshop¶
At the Fourth International workshop on RISC-V for HPC, Julián Morillo (BSC) presented our paper "Preparing to Hit the Ground Running: Adding RISC-V support to EESSI" (slides available here).
Julián covered the initial work that was done in the scope of the MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence to add support for RISC-V to EESSI, outlined the challenges we encountered, and shared the lessons we have learned along the way.
AHUG workshop¶
During the Arm HPC User Group (AHUG) workshop, Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent) gave a talk entitled "Extending Arm’s Reach by Going EESSI" (slides available here).
Next to a high-level introduction to EESSI, we briefly covered some of the challenges we encountered when testing the optimized software installations that we had built for the Arm Neoverse V1 microarchitecture, including bugs in OpenMPI and GROMACS.
Kenneth gave a live demonstration of how to get access to EESSI and start running the optimized software installations we provide through our CernVM-FS repository on a fresh AWS Graviton 3 instance in a matter of minutes.
POP workshop¶
In the afternoon on Thursday, Lara Peeters (HPC-UGent) presented MultiXscale during the Readiness of HPC Extreme-scale Applications workshop, which was organised by the POP EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence (slides available here).
Lara outlined the pilot use cases on which MultiXscale focuses, and explained how EESSI helps to achieve the goals of MultiXscale in terms of Productivity, Performance, and Portability.
At the end of the workshop, a group picture was taken with both organisers and speakers, which was a great way to wrap up a busy week in Hamburg!
Talks and demos on EESSI at exhibit¶
Not only was EESSI part of the official ISC'24 program via a dedicated BoF session and various workshops: we were also prominently present on the exhibit floor.
Microsoft Azure booth¶
Microsoft Azure invited us to give a 1-hour introductory presentation on EESSI on both Monday and Wednesday at their booth during the ISC'24 exhibit, as well as to provide live demonstrations at the demo corner of their booth on Tuesday afternoon on how to get access to EESSI and the user experience it provides.
Exhibit attendees were welcome to pass by and ask questions, and did so throughout the full 4 hours we were present there.
Both Microsoft Azure and AWS have been graciously providing resources in their cloud infrastructure free-of-cost for developing, testing, and demonstrating EESSI for several years now.
EuroHPC booth¶
The MultiXscale EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence we are actively involved in, and through which the development of EESSI is being co-funded since Jan'23, was invited by the EuroHPC JU to present the goals and preliminary achievements at their booth.
Elisabeth Ortega (HPCNow!) did the honours to give the last talk at the EuroHPC JU booth of the ISC'24 exhibit.
Stickers!¶
Last but not least: we handed out a boatload free stickers with the logo of both MultiXscale and EESSI itself, as well as of various of the open source software projects we leverage, including EasyBuild, Lmod, and CernVM-FS.
We have mostly exhausted our sticker collection during ISC'24, but don't worry: we will make sure we have more available at upcoming events...