At CERN, software stacks are created centrally and software distribution for experiments is done with CVMFS (https://cernvm.cern.ch/fs/ https://cernvm.cern.ch/f

At CERN, software stacks are created centrally and software distribution for experiments is done with CVMFS (https://cernvm.cern.ch/fs/ https://cernvm.cern.ch/fs/), an HTTP-based read-only FUSE filesystem. EESSI (https://eessi.io https://eessi.io) has taken this model further by using CVMFS, Gentoo Prefix (https://prefix.gentoo.org https://prefix.gentoo.org), and EasyBuild to create full HPC environments for various architectures. CVMFS also has a docker driver to allow only used parts of a container image to be fetched on demand, which is very good for cases in which only a small part of a fat image is used in a job. EESSI has some documentation about it here: https://www.eessi.io/docs/tutorial/containers/ https://www.eessi.io/docs/tutorial/containers/