[Beowulf] Containers in HPC

[David Mathog]

On 22-May-2019 12:00,  Gerald Henriksen wrote
> Paper on arXiv that may be of interest to some as it may be where HPC
> is heading even for private clusters:
> 
> Evalutation of Docker Containers for Scientific Workloads in the Cloud
> https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08415

Docker is fine so long as the program which is supplied in a Docker 
image is also supplied as source code in a form that other people can 
build relatively easily in other Linux environments.  Minimally that 
means some form of Makefile, enough documentation that it doesn't take a 
superhuman effort to push it through a compiler, and a few test cases to 
verify that the binary is working properly.

Unfortunately distributing a program in a Docker image seems to have 
become the latest excuse for not writing portable code (in the 
bioinformatics arena, anyway).

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech