Aaron Zauner

Although the "Modules" system has been around since the early 1990ties it has yet to find widespread adoption outside of the scientific computing and HPC community. Most FOSS developers rely on a wide range of tools to abstract and manage their Linux and UN!X environments for different scripting languages, compiler toolchains and applications. This problem has been long solved in the world of High Performance Computing where optimization of applications, toolchains and libraries is paramount. Environment Modules are a wonderful tool that will save time, help ease of development processes, reproducibility, and management of your development environment. This talk will give insight into how Modules work, which implementations are out there and how to use Modules instead of language bound tools as well as a comparison with common tools that the community uses to develop on Python and Ruby (for example) projects.

I intend to give a 20 min overview of the "Environment Modules" system as deployed on many scientific and HPC sites to FOSS developers, students and linux enthusiasts.

This will include a comparison of different Modules implementations their history and typical use cases in HPC and development environments and how Modules can be of help to FOSS developers and systems administrators. As a developer and systems engineer, I am familiar with a lot of different systems to manage multiple installations of e.g. script languages their environments and libraries. I'll give a short overview and comparison of those and compare these systems with Modules and show how developers and engineers alike can save time and effort in managing their environment for all applications, toolchains and script languages.