Singularity_containers_on_HPC.pdf (619.54 kB)
Singularity containers on HPC
presentation
posted on 2020-03-10, 03:52 authored by Wolfgang HayekContainerisation is a form of virtualisation that has become very popular in the world of IT
services and cloud computing, offering straightforward portability and deployment of
software and services without having to install a complex set of dependencies. It has
recently become available on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems through the
popular Singularity software package. Singularity is a containerisation tool that is
particularly suitable for HPC and scientific applications, featuring immutable software to
support reproducibility of scientific results, as well as integration with HPC file systems, MPI,
and more.
This talk will outline the basic concepts of containerisation and discuss a recent NeSI
consultancy project where a web server and database were containerised to process data
on the Mahuika HPC. The project is now easily portable and can scale out to many cores,
enabling very significant speed-ups.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Wolfgang Hayek is a research software engineer at NeSI and NIWA, and group
manager of NIWA’s scientific programming group, with many years of experience in
scientific computing and HPC.
Blair Bethwaite is solutions manager at NeSI; he has strong expertise in HPC, cloud
computing, cloud architectures, and scientific computing
Ben Roberts is an application support specialist at NeSI and has many years of
experience in scientific computing and HPC
