The HPC Container Experience on the Summit Supercomputer

Subil Abraham

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Containers are seeing widespread use in the world of High Performance Computing, with many HPC Centers either providing their own containerization solution or adopting existing ones like Singularity and Apptainer. The demand for containerization options come from users who want to take advantage of the portability and reproducibility containers can provide, as well as being able to build and use applications that are only distributed in container form or are otherwise unsuited to natively run in an HPC environment. The users served by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility are no exception. We go over the past and current containerization offerings at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, mainly focusing on the Summit supercomputer. We arrive at using a combination of Podman and Singularity to allow users to build and run containers directly on Summit, without requiring external resources or hardware for any step of the process. We look at a couple of projects running on Summit that greatly benefited from being able to use containers on Summit. And we compare benchmarks running natively and in containers on Summit at different scales, observing minimal performance difference and consistent behavior across all tests.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPEARC 2023 - Computing for the common good
Subtitle of host publicationPractice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages273-277
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450399852
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 23 2023
Event2023 Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, PEARC 2023 - Portland, United States
Duration: Jul 23 2023Jul 27 2023

Publication series

NamePEARC 2023 - Computing for the common good: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing

Conference

Conference2023 Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, PEARC 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period07/23/2307/27/23

Funding

This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.

Keywords

  • MPI
  • containers
  • high performance computing

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