Singularity Desktop Beta comes to macOS

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Today Sylabs announced Beta 1 release of Singularity Desktop for macOS, which allows Linux containers to be designed, built, tested, and signed/verified on macOS. Designed to meet the needs of High Performance Computing, Singularity provides a single universal on-ramp from developers’ workstations to local resources, the cloud, and all the way to edge.

At the inaugural meeting of the Singularity User Group (SUG) this past March at SDSC in San Diego, we officially embarked upon an important journey — a journey whose outcome is to ultimately transform that ‘attractive spectator’ (a.k.a. your macOS laptop or desktop) into a bona fide platform for computing. The transformation is being realized through the introduction of Singularity Desktop — software that allows users to design, build, test, and sign/verify Linux-based Singularity containers on macOS. Thus the purpose of this post is to hereby announce the next milestone in this important journey: availability of the first beta release of Singularity Desktop.

Using the standard installer for macOS, Singularity Desktop is effortlessly installed in the way common to all macOS apps. Prototyped by Sylabs’ software engineer Adrian Wobito just in time for presentation at SUG, this aspect of the product’s native macOS experience has been subsequently enhanced.

As our track record is making clear, we are working to close the feature/functionality gap with the Linux experience — ultimately ensuring that Singularity Desktop for macOS exceeds your expectations. As we systematically close this gap, you can also expect enhancements to be incorporated into Singularity Desktop from the Singularity core code base — as illustrated above; in other words, to anticipate what you might expect to ‘see’ in Singularity Desktop, it makes sense to follow developments in the Community Edition of Singularity itself.

Download the Singularity Desktop for macOS (Beta 1 Release)