At the back

Where this runs, what the samples are, who wrote it.

Where this runs

EasyBuild is a Python package. It installs with pip into a virtual environment and needs a modules tool and a compiler. Software compiles on a laptop exactly as it does on a compute node. The failing build in Reading a failed build and the checks in Writing one from nothing ran on a workstation. EESSI’s installation instructions cover a laptop. CernVM-FS provides a client profile for that case. The same stack somewhere else does it on four kinds of machine. On a large shared machine the mechanism stays the same and the consequences change: more users than maintainers, one tree, a scheduler, several microarchitectures, and a rebuild that costs somebody a night.

The path and the papers

The learning path is A path through this book. The bibliography is Papers.

What the samples are

The listings and transcripts are the book. A print or EPUB copy has those and nothing else.

In a browser, some pages also mount a table from eb-stack at build time. Editing that table changes the on-page answer. Escape opens a playground. The Ask chip at the bottom searches the book and the EasyBuild, EESSI and eb-stack remotes. Hypothesis loads on every article. Those controls are not in the EPUB. They do not configure, compile, or link.

When a step needs a real toolchain, the page shows a recording of a real run, with where and when printed beside it. That recording is what print gets too.

Who wrote this

Rohit Goswami maintains software stacks on a national machine. Rohit Goswami runs the same tools on a laptop. Rohit Goswami wrote eb-stack. eb-stack is the updater and generator that emits the .eb files EasyBuild then builds. The samples on these pages borrow tables from that generator. The samples are not the generator. The samples are not EasyBuild.