Getting Started with Containers on HPC

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ECP Supercontainers Tutorial Session

Details

Half-day Tutorial Session

Venue: ECP Annual Meeting 2020

Date: Wednesday, February 5th 2019 2:30pm - 6pm CST

Room: Champions I & II

Location: Houston, TX, USA

Topic Area: Programming Models & Systems Software

Keywords: Containerized HPC, System Software and Runtime Systems, Scientific Software Development, DevOps

Appropriate login details to our EC2 VM instances and a training account to the Cori supercomputer will all be provided to you at the start of the tutorial session. Please completed the necessary forms and replace XX with the values provided on your sheet.

hostname: tutXX.supercontainers.org

user: tutorial

password: HPCLinux12!

hostname: cori.nesrc.gov

user: trainXX

password: [provided in person]

Abstract

Container computing has revolutionized the way applications are developed and delivered. It offers opportunities that never existed before for significantly improving efficiency of scientific workflows and easily moving these workflows from the laptop to the supercomputer. Tools like Docker, Shifter, Singularity and Charliecloud enable a new paradigm for scientific and technical computing. However, to fully unlock its potential, users and administrators need to understand how to utilize these new approaches. This tutorial will introduce attendees to the basics of creating container images, explain best practices, and cover more advanced topics such as creating images to be run on HPC platforms using various container runtimes. The tutorial will also explain how research scientists can utilize container-based computing to accelerate their research and how these tools can boost the impact of their research by enabling better reproducibility and sharing of their scientific process without compromising security.

This is an updated version of the highly successful tutorial presented at SC16, SC17, SC18. It was attended by more than 100 people each year. The 2018 tutorial was very highly rated with 2.8 / 3 stars for “would recommend” and 4.3 / 5 stars for overall quality.

Prerequisites

This is a hands-on tutorial. Participants should bring a laptop and load or pre-install a terminal and/or ssh client in advance to make best use of time during the tutorial. We will be providing training user accounts to both pre-configured EC2 instances as well as the Cori Supercomputer at NERSC.

This tutorial is supported by the Amazon AWS Machine Learning Research Awards. EC2 images and temporary login credentials will be distributed onsite at the tutorial.

After the tutorial, you can boot our tutorial image yourself on Amazon EC2 to run through the tutorial again. We recommend you use your own EC2 key and change the password.

US-West-Oregon: ami-09bd35c8089302e0d

Optional Prerequisites

Users can also install Docker and Singularity prior to attending the tutorial session. Here, it may be beneficial to create a docker and sylabs (singularity) account in advance at https://cloud.docker.com/ and https://cloud.sylabs.io/ This accounts will be needed to create images on docker cloud/dockerhub and sylabs cloud.

Install Singularity on Linux

Install Singualrity on Mac (Alpha)

Install Docker for Desktop