[Beowulf] Containers in HPC

[Lance Wilson]

Hi Brian,
For single node jobs MPI can be run with the MPI binary from the container
with native performance for the shared memory type messages. This has
worked without issue since the very early days of Singularity. The only
tricky part has been multi-node and multi-container.

Cheers,

Lance
--
Dr Lance Wilson
Characterisation Virtual Laboratory (CVL) Coordinator &
Senior HPC Consultant
Ph: 03 99055942 (+61 3 99055942)
Mobile: 0437414123 (+61 4 3741 4123)
Multi-modal Australian ScienceS Imaging and Visualisation Environment
(www.massive.org.au)
Monash University


On Wed, 22 May 2019 at 23:49, Brian Dobbins <bdobbins at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Thanks, Gerald - I'll be reading this shortly.  And to add to any
> discussion, here's the Blue Waters container paper that I like to point
> people towards - from the same conference, in fact:
> https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.00556.pdf
>
> The key thing here is achieving *native* network performance through the
> MPICH ABI compatibility layer[1].  This is such a key technology.  Prior to
> this, I was slightly negative about containers, figuring MPI
> compatibility/performance was an issue - now, I'm eager to containerize
> some of our applications, as it can dramatically simplify
> installation/configuration for non-expert users.
>
> One thing I'm less certain about, and would welcome any information on, is
> whether things like Linux's cross-memory attach (XPMEM / CMA) can work
> across containers for MPI messages on the same node.  Since it's the same
> host kernel, I'm somewhat inclined to think so, but I haven't yet had the
> time to run any tests.  Anyway, given the complexity of a lot of projects
> these days, native performance in a containerized environment is pretty
> much the best of both worlds.
>
> [1] MPICH ABI Compatibility Initiative : https://www.mpich.org/abi/
>
> Cheers,
>   - Brian
>
>
> On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 7:10 AM Gerald Henriksen <ghenriks at gmail.com>
> 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
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