The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has announced the availability of the Extreme-Scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) v1.2 release.
ECP, a collaborative effort of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the E4S is a community effort to provide open source software packages for developing, deploying and running scientific applications on most high-performance computing platforms, from laptops to supercomputers.
“The E4S v1.2 release is a significant new release that includes the majority of ECP Software Technology (ST) portfolio of software products,” ECP stated in its announcement. “This release is intended to demonstrate the target approach for future delivery of the full ECP ST software stack as well as the usability of the current incarnation of the currently over 90 different packages and libraries. Links to product documentation and user forums can be found on the E4S DocPortal.
In addition to a refresh of existing packages in E4S v1.1 and new packages not available before in E4S, the ECP also announced the E4S DocPortal, which provides a single point of access to documentation for E4S products. The portal provides a searchable and sortable high-level description of each E4S product, including licensing and product support, along with a link to product documentation. DocPortal content is refreshed daily from the product repositories, so it is always the latest available content, according to ECP.
The E4S team also announced Version 1.0 of its E4S Community Policies, which are designed to better ensure software quality and improved user experience.
ECP said each E4S software distribution is built and tested regularly on a variety of platforms, from Linux clusters to leadership platforms, adding that because “this is a demonstration release, not all the packages are fully interoperable.”
E4S uses the Spack meta-build tool to provide containers, turn-key pre-built binaries and from-source build capabilities:
- Containers: The current E4S container offerings include Docker, Singularity, CharlieCloud, and OVA images. Various CPUs are supported including X86_64, PPC64LE, and AARCH64. Popular Linux distributions are also supported including Hat RHEL 7, Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic), and CentOS 7. Minimal Spack images serve as a foundation for lean production runs and to create the fuller, more tailored E4S images containing a comprehensive selection of E4S software. The latter are ideal for trying out the E4S software.
- Turn-key: The E4S recipes make use of Spack packages available as pre-built binaries in the E4S Build Cache. The cache currently has more than 22k entries.
- From-source: Recipes for building images from scratch are available on the E4S GitHub repository.
More information on E4S v1.2 can be found on the E4S.io website. and in this article from ECP.
source: Exascale Computing Project
