Singularity containers introduce a compelling means for unlocking the implied dependency between application toolchains and operating system. By encapsulating everything but the kernel in a single file, Singularity containers decouple the runtime and allow it to be highly portable in a trusted way.
Towards Reproducible Data Analysis Using Cloud and Container Technologies
May 29, 2019 by
Sergio Maffioletti from the University of Zurich gave this talk at the hpc-ch forum on Cloud and Containers. “In this talk, we’ll provide an overview of the challenges faced by both research infrastructure providers and Science IT units, along with best practices to improve the reproducibility of data analysis using cloud and container technologies.”
How Singularity Containers can ease the Transition to RHEL 8
May 8, 2019 by
The general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was announced this week at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. In this special guest feature, Ian Lumb writes that the company’s Singularity containers can ease the transition to RHEL 8. “RHEL 8 is a transition over time, not a discrete event in time. Singularity containers preserve your heavily vested legacy deployments, while enabling you to make the transition on your terms.”
TACC Podcast Looks at the Challenges of Computational Reproducibility
April 23, 2019 by
In this TACC Podcast, Dan Stanzione and Doug James from the Texas Advanced Computing Center discuss the thorny issue of reproducibility in HPC. “Computational reproducibility is a subset of the broader and even harder topic of scientific reproducibility,” said Dan Stanzione, TACC’s executive director. “If we can’t get the exact same answer bit-for-bit, then what’s close enough? What’s a scientifically valid way to represent that? That’s what we’re after.”
Sylabs boosts HPC Containers with SingularityPRO 3.1
April 23, 2019 by
Today Sylabs announced the release of SingularityPRO 3.1 in what the company is calling a watershed moment for enterprise customers everywhere. “SingularityPRO 3.1 is the most highly anticipated release of our enterprise software ever,” said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of Sylabs. “With this release, we’re rapidly advancing container science, making it a truly opportune time for those seeking to containerize the most demanding enterprise performance computing workloads in the most trusted way.”
Singularity: Container Workflows for Compute
February 20, 2019 by
Greg Kurtzer from Sylabs gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. “Singularity is a widely adopted container technology specifically designed for compute-based workflows making application and environment reproducibility, portability and security a reality for HPC and AI researchers and resources. Here we will describe a high-level overview of Singularity and demonstrate how to integrate Singularity containers into existing application and resource workflows as well as describe some new trending models that we have been seeing.”
Video: Container Mythbusters
February 18, 2019 by
Michael Jennings from LANL gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. “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 HPC at all. 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!”
HPC in the Hands of Every Engineer – With Software Containers
February 11, 2019 by
In this special guest feature, Wolfgang Gentzsch from The UberCloud writes that we’ve never been so close to ubiquitous computing for researchers and engineers. “High-performance computing continues to progress, but the next big step toward ubiquitous HPC is coming from software container technology based on Docker, facilitating software packaging and porting, ease of access and use, service stack automation and self-service, and simplifying software maintenance and support.”
Video: HPC Containers – Democratizing HPC
January 20, 2019 by
In this video from SC18 in Dallas, CJ Newburn from NVIDIA describes how developers can quickly containerize their applications and how users can benefit from running their workloads with containers from the NVIDIA GPU Cloud. “A container essentially creates a self contained environment. Your application lives in that container along with everything the application depends on, so the whole bundle is self contained.”
VMware Powers Machine Learning & HPC Workloads
December 10, 2018 by
In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Ziv Kalminovich from VMware describes how the company’s powerful virtualization capabilities bring flexibility and performance to HPC workloads. “With VMware, you can capture the benefits of virtualization for HPC workloads while delivering performance that is comparable to bare-metal. Our approach to virtualizing HPC adds a level of flexibility, operational efficiency, agility and security that cannot be achieved in bare-metal environments—enabling faster time to insights and discovery.”
