I just wanted to pile in here a little bit. Singularity is great! I've
tried to use containers before but I've found them to be something of a
pain in the neck (probably it's just me). But Singularity is very simple to
use even with MPI codes! I've run a few sort of "medium level" MPI codes
without issues ("medium" means a single large node with 32GB of memory).
I've tested out the cross-platform capability and found it to work well
(there are a couple of gotchas - email the singularity list if you need
help). I built a Singularity container (called a .sapp file) on a CentOS 6
system and run it on a Linux Mint system without issues.I wrote an article for HPC Admin Magazine about it - it should appear this coming week sometime. It's a simple introduction article, but does include an example MPI code. I hope to write a couple of follow-on articles that explain a little more. Singularity is very easy to use and works really well. I highly recommend you try it out (it's not difficult to build or use). I'm going to start using it much more often. Thanks! Jeff On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 1:20 PM, Douglas Eadline <[email protected]> wrote: > > This is a very cool project. From the announcement: > > > Singularity is a container platform built around the notion of "Mobility > of Compute". With Singularity you can build executable containers based on > your host system and define what happens when that container is launched. > Processes inside the container can be single binaries, or a complex of > binaries, scripts and data. > > While there are several full featured container systems that already > exist, these container solutions are feature rich as they tend to emulate > a full hardware virtualization hypervisor. Because of many of these > features (e.g. user level contexts and ability to escalate to root) > implementation on large scale multi-user resources is difficult and maybe > impossible. This is what motivated the development of Singularity; a > lightweight, non-invasive and easily implementable container system that > supports existing workflows and focuses on application portability and > mobility. > > In this release, you can expect the following support: > > * Ability to create Singularity containers based on a package specfile > * Specfile templates can be generated automatically (singularity specgen > ...) > * Support for various automatic dependency resolution > * Dynamic libraries > * Perl scripts and modules > * Python scripts and modules > * R scripts and modules > * Basic X11 support > * Open MPI (v2.1 - which is not yet released) > * Direct execution of Singularity containers (e.g. ./container.sapp [opts]) > * Access to files in your home directory and a scratch directory > * Existing IO (pipes, stdio, stderr, and stdin) all maintained through > container > * Singularity internal container cache management > * Standard networking access (exactly as it does on the host) > * Singularity containers run within existing resource contexts (CGroups > and ulimits are maintained) > * Easily integrated into existing schedulers and batch scripts > * Support for scalable execution of MPI parallel jobs > * Singularity containers are portable between Linux distributions > > You can download Singularity and obtain more information here: > > http://gmkurtzer.github.io/singularity/ > > -- > Doug > > -- > Mailscanner: Clean > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf >
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