[Beowulf] Singularity 1.0 is out

[Olli-Pekka Lehto]

Based on some early testing it seems to work as advertised. It's fairly efficient in discovering dependencies in some quite large software packages. Bit worried about the setuid binary (just out of healthy paranoia) so I'm not too keen on unleashing it immediately to production services.

In other news, there's another project in an early that is not targeted for HPC specifically but could be very interesting: https://github.com/jfrazelle/binctr

So now there's 3 different container paradigms to choose from. Maybe we'll get a 4th one next week. :)

-- 
Olli-Pekka Lehto
Development Manager
Computing Platforms
CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd.
E-Mail: olli-pekka.lehto at csc.fi
Tel: +358 50 381 8604
skype: oplehto // twitter: ople

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Douglas Eadline" <deadline at eadline.org>
> To: "Beowulf list" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> Sent: Friday, 15 April, 2016 20:20:04
> Subject: [Beowulf] Singularity 1.0 is out

> 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, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf