EESSI: A cross-platform ready-to-use optimised scientific software stack

Getting scientific software installed correctly and ensuring it performs well has been a ubiquitous problem for several decades now, which is compounded currently by the changing landscape of computational science with the (re-)emergence of different microprocessor families, and the expansion to additional scientific domains like artificial intelligence and next-generation sequencing. The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) project aims to provide a ready-to-use stack of scientific software installations that can be leveraged easily on a variety of platforms, ranging from personal workstations to cloud environments and supercomputer infrastructure, without making compromises with respect to performance. In this article, we provide a detailed overview of the project, highlight potential use cases, and demonstrate that the performance of the provided scientific software installations can be competitive with system-specific installations.