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Getting started with EESSI

On our HPC cluster EESSI is used to load modules that are needed for executing programs. EESSI can be sourced with the following command:

source /cvmfs/software.eessi.io/versions/2023.06/init/bash

Once this is working, you can get started loading modules. There are two different commands available to search for modules. module avail <NAME> and module spider <NAME>. Searching for modules using module avail will only return modules than can directly be loaded without any prerequisits. Meanwhile, module spider will show all the available modules, this means that some modules you find may require you to load other modules first before you can use it. Both of these commands will return all entries in it's database that match the given module name. If you do not pass any module name, then it will return a complete overview of the modules within it's scope.

If using these search commands don't help you find the module you are looking for you can also use the command module keyword this command will search inside of the description of modules instead of in the title. This allows you to do more generic search for packages.

When you have found that the module you are looking for exists, you can find it's actual name such that you can load it in. e.g.:

module spider python

returns:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Python:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Description:
      Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly
      and integrate your systems more effectively.

     Versions:
        Python/3.11.3-GCCcore-12.3.0
        Python/3.11.5-GCCcore-13.2.0

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  For detailed information about a specific "Python" package (including
  how to load the modules) use the module's full name.
  Note that names that have a trailing (E) are extensions provided by
  other modules.
  For example:
       $ module spider Python/3.11.5-GCCcore-13.2.0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From this you can extract that the package has multiple version you can choose from. you can then load either version using this command:

module load Python/3.11.5-GCCcore-13.2.0

After running this command the module will be loaded in your shell environment. You can now use it to do anything you need to do with it.

To see which modules are currently loading you can use the following command:

module list

If you want to remove the modules use:

module purge