January 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: Containers on Summit
The OLCF hosts monthly User Conference Calls. These calls are your opportunity to speak with center personnel to get the latest updates, express any concerns you may have, etc. No registration is required for this event.
Monthly Topic: Containers on Summit
Speaker: Subil Abraham (OLCF)
Abstract:
Containers are being used more and more in the HPC arena to encapsulate user applications and their associated libraries. This encapsulation makes application builds easily repeatable with minimal effort, greatly reducing the headache of distributing and rebuilding complex HPC applications. Summit now has the capability to build and run containers. In this talk, we will look at some examples where containers were extremely useful when running a native application on Summit wasn’t really an option. We will go over how to build containers on Summit’s login node, and how containerized applications can access Summit’s MPI and GPU capabilities. We will also discuss where containers are and aren’t appropriate to use, and also look at some pitfalls and drawbacks users need to be wary of, particularly because of Summit’s PowerPC architecture.
