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Adding additional software

If the software you require is currently not available in the Federated Software Catalog (FSC) of EFP, you can either look into adding the software to it so it becomes part of FSC, or install the software on top of what FSC currently provides.

Adding software to FSC

As the EFP Federated Software Catalog consists of the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI), adding software to it effectively comes down to adding software to EESSI.

Detailed information on adding software to EESSI is available in the EESSI documentation.

To add software to EESSI, support for installing that software with EasyBuild must be available. Once that is the case, a pull request can be opened to get the software built and deployed into the EESSI repository.

It is important to take into account the EESSI contribution policy, in particular that software must redistributable, which is usually the case for open source software.

Locally installing software on top of FSC

If you are not (yet) interested in having the software you require available on all systems where EESSI is available, you can look into installing it on top of EESSI on the system(s) you are using, in your account or project.

The main benefit of this is flexibility, since you can customize the installation to your requirements. The downside is that installing the software on each system you are using is cumbersome, and may take some time (especially if you run into problems).

Installing software on top of EESSI can be done with EasyBuild (which is recommended), which is facilitated using the EESSI-extend module, or manually. Using Spack to install software on top of EESSI is currently being explored, see for example this blog post.

More information on installing software on top of EESSI is available here.

Getting help

If you need help with adding additional software to the EFP Federated Software Catalog so it can be used on the EuroHPC systems, or with installing software on top of it on EuroHPC systems, please contact the EFP Helpdesk.