In this video from the 2019 Stanford HPC Conference, Michael Jennings from LANL presents: Container Mythbusters.
“As containers initially grew to prominence within the greater Linux community, particularly in the hyperscale/cloud and web application space, there was very little information out there about using Linux containers for high-performance computing (HPC) at all, so those who were interested in making use of this fledgling technology were pretty much on their own. Today, we have the opposite problem: There’s so much information out there on this topic nowadays — much of it confusing, confounding, or even conflicting! — that it can be all but impossible to separate the facts from the fluff…or worse, the Dumbledores from the Voldemorts!
In this session, we’ll confront this problem head-on by clearing up some common misconceptions about containers, bust some myths born out of misunderstanding and marketing hype alike, and learn how to safely (and securely!) navigate the Linux container landscape with an eye toward what the future holds for containers in HPC and how we can all get there together!
Michael Jennings has been a UNIX/Linux sysadmin and software engineer for over 20 years. He has been the author of or a contributor to numerous open source software projects, including Charliecloud, Mezzanine, Eterm, RPM, Warewulf/PERCEUS, and TORQUE. Additionally, he co-founded the Caos Foundation, creators of CentOS, and has been the lead developer on 3 separate Linux distributions. He currently serves as the Platforms Team Lead in the HPC Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, responsible for managing some of our nation’s most powerful supercomputers and is the primary author/maintainer for the LBNL Node Health Check (NHC) project. He is also the Vice President of HPCXXL, the extreme-scale HPC Users group.
