EasyBuild: Building Software with Ease

Maintaining a collection of software installations for a diverse user base can be a tedious, repetitive, error-prone and time-consuming task. Because most end-user software packages for an HPC environment are not readily available in existing OS package managers, they require significant extra effort from the user support team. Reducing this effort would free up a large amount of time for tackling more urgent tasks. In this work, we present EasyBuild, a software installation framework written in Python that aims to support the various installation procedures used by the vast collection of software packages that are typically installed in an HPC environment - catering to widely different user profiles. It is built on top of existing tools, and provides support for well-established installation procedures. Supporting customised installation procedures requires little effort, and sharing implementations of installation procedures becomes very easy. Installing software packages that are supported can be done by issuing a single command, even if dependencies are not available yet. Hence, it simplifies the task of HPC site support teams, and even allows end-users to keep their software installations consistent and up to date.