hpc3

During the euroHPC Summit in Göteborg we discussed the latest developments and the goals we want to push within the euroHPC community. It boils down to raise awareness about container in general and synchronize the efforts of the different entities.
I gave an introduction to the HPC Container Conformance project (HPC3) in which I disected annotations and labels and how we might deal with those.

The last blog post introduced the HPC Container Conformance (HPC3) project - a project to provide guidance on how to build and annotate container images for HPC use cases.

For HPW we'll need to cover two main parts (IMHO) first:

1. Entrypoint/Cmd relationship: How do interactive users and batch systems expect a container to behave. We need to make sure that a container works with docker run, singularity run and podman run out of the box (engine configuration already done)
2. Annotation Baseline: Which annotations do we need and want, some are mandatory and some are optional.

This blob post is going to set a baseline in Terms of Expected Container Behavior to make sure that we can switch HPC3 conformant images of the same application and - ideally - have the job ran in the same way.

A lot of HPC sites have an unwritten understanding of how to use them:

1. You need a user to log in. Either on the submithost or when a job launches on the compute nodes,
2. Once logged in, your environment is setup with default apps, specific application are available using module load from a central software share,
3. you might be even able to install new software in your home directory.

A central software-share with curated sets of scientific applications and libraries is/was a powerful concept. But with containers this falls a part to some degree...