Scaling Podman on Perlmutter: Embracing a Community-Supported Container Ecosystem
DescriptionContainers have provided a popular new paradigm for managing software and services. However, in HPC the use of containers has historically been more difficult due to multi-tenancy, security, and performance requirements; consequently several custom HPC container runtimes have emerged from the community. The resulting fractured ecosystem presents challenges both for HPC container framework maintainers and for users. In this paper, we describe work at NERSC to adapt Podman, a popular OCI-compliant container framework developed by Red Hat, Inc., for use in HPC. Podman has several key features which make it appealing for use in an HPC environment: its rootless container mode addresses many security concerns, it has a standardized command interface which will be familiar to users of established popular container runtimes, it is daemon-less, and it is open-source and community supported. Additional innovations at NERSC have enabled Podman to achieve the good scaling behavior required by HPC applications.
Author/Presenters
Event Type
Workshop
TimeMonday, 14 November 202211am - 11:30am CST
LocationC140-142
Recorded
W