[Beowulf] HPC workflows

[Michael Di Domenico]

On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 1:13 PM John Hanks <griznog at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From the perspective of the software being containerized, I'm even more skeptical. In my world (bioinformatics) I install a lot of crappy software. We're talking stuff resulting from "I read the first three days of 'learn python in 21 days' and now I'm an expert, just run this after installing these 17 things from pypi...and trust the output" I'm good friends with crappy software, we hang out together a lot. To me it just doesn't feel like making crappy software more portable is the *right* thing to do. When I walk my dog, I follow him with a bag and "containerize" what drops out. It makes it easier to carry around, but doesn't change what it is. As of today I see the biggest benefit of containers as that they force a developer to actually document the install procedure somewhere in a way that actually has to work so we can see firsthand how ridiculous it is (*cough* tensorflow *cough*).

I vote this the single best explanation of containers I've heard all year... :)