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Software Catalog

The EFP Federated Software Catalog is based on EESSI.

Options to make EESSI available at a Hosting Entity

There are 3 methods currently being used to make EESSI available by EuroHPC Hosting Entities:

  1. Native CernVM-FS installation (recommended)
  2. SquashFS export of CernVM-FS
  3. Synchronise CernVM-FS to a parallel system and symlink to the expected /cvmfs location

For each case we outline some configuration options.

Details on how to configure CernVM-FS for an HPC system is provided in the EESSI documentation and by an associated tutorial on CernVM-FS (with a specific section dedicated to the configuration on HPC systems).

It is recommended that each Hosting Entity configure a private Stratum 1 mirror server to give themselves some protection from network disconnect problems.

It is also recommended that there should be a proxy for every ~500 nodes. Such proxies could, for example, be set up on the login nodes of an HPC system.

The minimal setup is a proxy to the public Stratum 1 mirrors of EESSI.

SquashFS export of CernVM-FS

Specific parts of the EESSI repository can be exported to a SquashFS image, which can then be mounted under /cvmfs/software.eessi.io.

This is partially covered by the documentation on syncing to another file system.

Additional specific details will be provided here soon.

Synchronise CernVM-FS to a parallel system

The contents of the EESSI repository can be synchronized to a directory on a parallel filesystem like GPFS or Lustre. Note that a symbolic link /cvmfs/software.eessi.io is required on each node to ensure that software installations provided by EESSI are accessible via the standard path.

This is partially covered by the documentation on syncing to another file system.

Additional specific details will be provided here soon.

Synchronisation with the EFP Federated Software Catalog

In order to give end users a uniform user experience across the EFP Hosting Entities, the minimum synchronisation frequency with the upstream with the upstream EFP Federated Software Catalog is once every 24 hours.