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Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S)

The Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) is a curated software stack from the Spack ecosystem that is continuously built and tested on several pre-exascale systems. E4S is composed of many open-source projects, including xSDK, dev-tools, math-libraries, compilers, and more. For a complete product list see the E4S Product Dictionary.

E4S is shipped as a container (Docker, Singularity, Shifter, CharlieCloud), a buildcache, or a Spack manifest (spack.yaml). Currently, we focus on building E4S from source using a spack.yaml file provided by the E4S team from https://github.com/E4S-Project/e4s.

Note

We install as many packages from E4S provided in spack.yaml as possible. Some packages were intentionally skipped such as specs tied to develop branches or packages built for GPUs. Some additional packages couldn't be installed or had concretization issues with our base compiler.

E4S Support Timeline

This table outlines the support lifetime for each E4S version. The Release Date is the day the E4S release and user documentation went live. Once an E4S version has reached the end of support we will remove that version, corresponding modulefiles and user documentation. As we approach the End of Support for a particular release, we will communicate via email and the modulefile will include a banner when loading the module.

We recommend users to port their application and any scripts to the newer release.

System Version Release Date End of Support
Perlmutter v0.22 June 3rd 2024 Sep 1st 2025
Perlmutter 23.08 Dec 5th 2023 Dec 13th 2024
Perlmutter 23.05 Aug 7th 2023 Sep 30th 2024
Perlmutter 22.11 Mar 14th 2023 Jun 10th 2024

Points of Contact

If you need help with E4S at NERSC, you can submit a ticket at https://help.nersc.gov/. To raise issues with the E4S team, please report them in the E4S Github project which will be triaged to the E4S team. If you would like to see your package in E4S, please contact the E4S team.

References

Past Events

Title Date Links
E4S at NERSC 2022 Aug 25th, 2022 Overview of ECP Software Technology
Hardware and Integration
What is E4S?
Software Deployment at Facilities
E4S Training
Video Recording
E4S at DOE Facilities with Deep Dive at NERSC Oct 4th, 2021 Introduction to E4S
ECP Software Technology Overview
Software Deployment at Facilities
Recording