Skip to content
  • ✓ AIP1 Isambard-AI Phase 1 supported
  • ✓ AIP2 Isambard-AI Phase 2 supported
  • ✓ I3 Isambard 3 supported
  • ✗ BC5 BlueCrystal 5 unsupported

E4S

Prerequisites

E4S (Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack) is an open-source, community-driven collection of high-quality HPC and AI libraries and tools. This software suite provides containers and a spack repository for applications. On Isambard-AI E4S has specific optimisations and is continually tested.

These links lead to the official E4S documentation:

Example: Downloading the E4S Singularity Container on Isambard-AI

First go to the E4S Container Releases page under "Singularity aarch64 Download - CUDA 90 - Ubuntu".

  • aarch64 to support the Grace CPUs on Isambard-AI
  • CUDA 90 to support the Hopper GPUs on Isambard-AI with GPU architecture sm90
$ srun -N 1 --gpus 1 --pty bash
$ wget https://oaciss.nic.uoregon.edu/e4s/images/25.11/e4s-cuda90-aarch64-25.11.sif

Local copy available

A copy of the singularity container has been pre-downloaded at this path:

/projects/public/brics/containers/e4s/e4s-cuda90-aarch64-25.11.sif

We can now run the container and list example Python packages:

$ singularity run --nv e4s-cuda90-aarch64-25.11.sif
Singularity> pip list | grep -iE 'torch|huggingface|vllm|tensorflow|jax|biopython|transformers' 
biopython                                1.85
huggingface-hub                          0.35.3
jax                                      0.7.1
...
pytorch-lightning                        2.5.5
pytorch-triton                           3.3.0+git96316ce5
...
tensorflow                               2.20.0.dev0+selfbuilt
torch                                    2.8.0+cu129
...
torchvision                              0.23.0
...
transformers                             4.57.0
vllm                                     0.11.1.dev0+gb8b302cde.d20251010.cu129