In this video from the Blue Waters 2018 Symposium, Maxim Belkin presents a tutorial on Containers: Shifter and Singularity on Blue Waters. “Container solutions are a great way to seamlessly execute code on a variety of platforms. Not only they are used to abstract away from the software stack of the underlying operating system, they also enable reproducible computational research. In this mini-tutorial, I will review the process of working with Shifter and Singularity on Blue Waters.”
Shifter – Docker Containers for HPC
April 15, 2018 by
Alberto Madonaa gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “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.”
RCE Podcast Looks at Shifter Containers for HPC
July 10, 2017 by
In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Shane Canon and Doug Jacobsen from NERSC, the authors of Shifter. “Shifter is a prototype implementation that NERSC is developing and experimenting with as a scalable way of deploying containers in an HPC environment. It works by converting user or staff generated images in Docker, Virtual Machines, or CHOS (another method for delivering flexible environments) to a common format.”
HPC Workflows Using Containers
April 21, 2017 by
“In this talk we will discuss a workflow for building and testing Docker containers and their deployment on an HPC system using Shifter. Docker is widely used by developers as a powerful tool for standardizing the packaging of applications across multiple environments, which greatly eases the porting efforts. On the other hand, Shifter provides a container runtime that has been specifically built to fit the needs of HPC. We will briefly introduce these tools while discussing the advantages of using these technologies to fulfill the needs of specific workflows for HPC, e.g., security, high-performance, portability and parallel scalability.”
New Site Compares Docker, Singularity, Shifter, and Univa Grid Engine Container Edition
January 6, 2017 by
A new site developed by Tin H compares the HPC virtualization capabilities of Docker, Singularity, Shifter, and Univa Grid Engine Container Edition. “They bring the benefits of container to the HPC world and some provide very similar features. The subtleties are in their implementation approach. MPI maybe the place with the biggest difference.”
