The good folks at Sylabs have added plugin support to Singularity, an open source-based container platform designed for scientific and HPC environments.
As this post from February 2018 indicates, plugin support in Singularity has been on our minds for some time. After the successful reimplementation of the Singularity core in a combination of the Go and C programming languages, software engineer Michael Bauer turned his attention to the development of a framework capable of introducing plugin support for Singularity. Once designed, Michael’s prototyping progressed rapidly, and attendees of our inaugural meeting of the Singularity User Group (SUG) were provided with a sneak preview of this very significant addition to the core capabilities of Singularity.
At the present time, included in this RC1 version of Singularity 3.2.0 is a basic framework for creating and managing plugins. Through a new command group, plugins can be compiled, installed/uninstalled, enabled/disabled, listed, and inspected.
In case it wasn’t obvious, the reason we’re so excited about this brand-new, next-level capability is that it is designed to enable the extensibility and customizability of Singularity in a modular, effective, and efficient way. There have already been numerous discussions, at SUG and elsewhere, regarding this plugin framework. We cannot wait to share in future posts news of the plugins developed by members of the Singularity user, developer, and provider community.
