Alberto Madonna from CSCS
In this video from the 2018 Swiss HPC Conference, Alberto Madonna from CSCS presents: Shifter – Docker Containers for HPC.
“Building and deploying software on high-end computing systems is a challenging task. High performance applications have to reliably run across multiple platforms and environments, and make use of site-specific resources while resolving complicated software-stack dependencies. Containers are a type of lightweight virtualization technology that attempt to solve this problem by packaging applications and their environments into standard units of software that are: portable, easy to build and deploy, have a small footprint, and low runtime overhead. In this work we present an extension to the container runtime of Shifter that provides containerized applications with a mechanism to access GPU accelerators and specialized networking from the host system, effectively enabling performance portability of containers across HPC resources. The presented extension makes possible to rapidly deploy high-performance software on supercomputers from containerized applications that have been developed, built, and tested in non-HPC commodity hardware, e.g. the laptop or workstation of a researcher.”
Alberto Madonna joined CSCS in 2016 as a Scientific Software Engineer. Focused on programming languages including CUDA development, Alberto graduated with a MSc in Aerospace Engineering from the Università degli Studi di Padova in 2013 and served as a Software Engineer Research Fellow at Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma-INAF in Italy prior to joining CSCS.
Alberto has a deep passion for programming and software development with a main interest in Engineering Simulation and a goal of contributing to the advancement of engineering analysis and design tools through exciting opportunities offered by emerging parallel computing technologies, such as GPUs.
