Initial workstation docs update

docs/platforms/linux-workstation.md

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ hide:
 ---
 
 ### Introduction
-The Linux Workstation platform provides a flexible [Ubuntu](https://ubuntu.com/) 20.04 cloud instance, with web-browser access to the graphical desktop or shell. Optionally, users may add an external IP address, which allows the instance to be accessed from a machine outside of the project using [SSH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Shell).
+The Linux Workstation platform provides a flexible [Ubuntu](https://ubuntu.com/) 22.04 cloud instance, with web-browser access to the graphical desktop or shell. Optionally, users may add an external IP address, which allows the instance to be accessed from a machine outside of the project using [SSH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Shell).
 
 The workstation instance has a cloud volume (or virtual disk) available at `/data`, which may be useful for working with large datasets. The capacity of this cloud volume is configurable when launching the platform.
 
@@ -23,3 +23,82 @@ The workstation instance has a cloud volume (or virtual disk) available at `/dat
 ### Advanced
 #### Platform monitoring
 A [Grafana](https://grafana.com/oss/grafana/) dashboard for system monitoring is included in the platform, and is accessible from the platforms page. General current and historical system information is visible.
+
+#### EESSI
+The [EESSI](http://www.eessi.io/docs/) suite of software is included in the Workstation appliance. This suite includes a diverse collection of toolkits and modules for research computing purposes. More details on the architecture of the EESSI suite can be found [here](http://www.eessi.io/docs/overview/).
+
+To assess whether the EESSI suite is functioning correctly, you can run some of their demo environments avaliable in the EESSI demo [Github](https://github.com/EESSI/eessi-demo/tree/main) repository. You can clone the repository using the command below.
+
+```git clone https://github.com/EESSI/eessi-demo.git```
+
+As an example, we can run the TensorFlow demo environment to ensure the environment is setup correctly. It is first neccessary to source the EESSI bash environment, to do this please run the following command.
+
+```source /cvmfs/pilot.eessi-hpc.org/versions/2021.12/init/bash```
+
+This script will initialize the Lua modules for the Software layer in the EESSI stack and source the neccessary environment variables for you to interact with them. To assess whether the script completed successfully, you can try run the ``module avail`` command to list all modules avaliable to you in the environment. A successful initialization should result in an output resembling the one below.
+
+```
+[EESSI pilot 2021.12] $ module avail
+
+------ /cvmfs/pilot.eessi-hpc.org/versions/2021.12/software/linux/x86_64/intel/haswell/modules/all ------
+   ant/1.10.8-Java-11
+   Arrow/0.17.1-foss-2020a-Python-3.8.2
+   Bazel/3.6.0-GCCcore-9.3.0
+   ...
+```
+Now you have a functioning environment, you can begin experimenting with the software included in EESSI. Enter the directory of the EESSI-demo repository we cloned earlier, then enter the TensorFlow directory. 
+
+This TensorFlow project contains a demonstration 4-layer neural network model which runs against the MNIST digits dataset. You can tinker with the ``TensorFlow-2.x_mnist-test.py`` script to setup a different model architecture as you like. To run the default configuration, you can execute the ``run.sh`` script inside the directory, which should produce an evaluation output like below.
+
+```
+[EESSI pilot 2021.12] $ ./run.sh 
+2023-10-09 13:15:04.546828: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/process_util.cc:146] Creating new thread pool with default inter op setting: 2. Tune using inter_op_parallelism_threads for best performance.
+Epoch 1/5
+1875/1875 [==============================] - 5s 3ms/step - loss: 0.2951 - accuracy: 0.9138
+Epoch 2/5
+1875/1875 [==============================] - 14s 7ms/step - loss: 0.1445 - accuracy: 0.9568
+Epoch 3/5
+1875/1875 [==============================] - 6s 3ms/step - loss: 0.1070 - accuracy: 0.9669
+Epoch 4/5
+1875/1875 [==============================] - 3s 2ms/step - loss: 0.0886 - accuracy: 0.9732
+Epoch 5/5
+1875/1875 [==============================] - 3s 2ms/step - loss: 0.0766 - accuracy: 0.9763
+313/313 - 0s - loss: 0.0745 - accuracy: 0.9774
+
+real    0m41.002s
+user    2m24.151s
+sys     1m54.599s
+```
+Guides on how to utilise EESSI further can be found [here](http://www.eessi.io/docs/using_eessi/eessi_demos/).
+
+
+#### Podman
+
+Podman is a container framework provided in the Workstation appliance for the purpose of installing, managing and developing OCI containers. We **strongly** recommend installing any software you wish to add to the your Workstation via podman, as software installed via the package manager or otherwise located outside of ``/home`` will be removed during image upgrades. In-place upgrades are not supported in the Workstation appliance as to reduce dependancy issues between migrations, instead your ``/home`` directory is kept as a seperate partition and re-mounted after the Workstation has been re-imaged.
+
+The podman is syntatically similar to the Docker CLI. For instance, to setup a basic Apache webserver you can run through the series of commands below:
+
+Pull the Apache image:
+
+```podman pull docker.io/library/httpd```
+
+Query the list locally available images to ensure Apache got pulled correctly:
+
+```podman image ls | grep httpd```
+
+Start the Apache webserver:
+
+```podman run --name apache -p 8080:80 -d httpd```
+
+Query the list of active containers to ensure Apache is running:
+
+```podman ps | grep apache```
+
+Make a request to the Apache webserver to ensure the container is running correctly and is accessible.
+
+```
+ubuntu@workstation-ssh:~$ curl localhost:8080
+<html><body><h1>It works!</h1></body></html>
+```
+
+If setting up the webserver didn't produce any unexpected behaviour, podman is running correctly in your Workstation appliance. For more advanced information about using podman, you can check out the docs [here](https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/).