Environment Modules is a utility that has been used to manage executables and paths for high-performance computing clusters for multiple decades (1991!). The basic idea is that you can use modules to adapt your processing environment (and $PATH) to make sure that your environment is consistent. Importantly, this allows system administrators the ability to install and maintain multiple versions of software for different users. This tool can also be used to effectively manage your bioinformatics processing pipelines to ensure consistent analysis runs. For example, if you have a set of samples that will need to be analyzed consistently over a long time span, you could use modules to make sure that the same version of a program is used throughout the entire experiment while letting you use newer versions for different experiments.
If you are running your samples on a computing cluster, chances are you are already using modules to configure your environment (add progra