The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Workshop: 4th International Workshop on Containers and New Orchestration Paradigms for Isolated Environments in HPC (CANOPIE-HPC)
Authors: Laurie Stephey and Richard Shane Canon (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)); Aditi Gaur (Microsoft Azure, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)); Daniel Fulton (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)); and Andrew Younge (Sandia National Laboratories)
Abstract: Containers 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.