[slurm-users] Heterogeneous HPC

[Christoph Brüning]

Dear Mahmood,

Docker is somewhat tricky, because it needs a daemon running and there 
is no fine grained control over who is allowed to start and stop 
containers. Also getting the container on the node can be unpleasant 
(docker hub? private registry? build docker containers on the node 
before running them?). I would recommend against it!

However, there are projects like Singularity or Charliecloud designed to 
bring the "bring your own environment" idea to HPC.

We have Singularity installed, and some of our users use it. It seems to 
work reasonably well, as I have heard no complaint except that the 
available version is somewhat outdated...

Best,
Christoph


On 19/09/2019 10.08, Mahmood Naderan wrote:
> Hi
> The question is not directly related to Slurm, but is actually related 
> to the people in this community.
> 
> For heterogeneous environments, where different operating systems, 
> application and library versions are needed for HPC users, I would like 
> to know it using docker/containers is better than yielding virtual machines?
> 
> Actually, it is lighter than VM, however, I haven't seen a docker image 
> for Matlab for example. If that is possible, can Slurm be used to 
> schedule containers?
> If someone has any experience using docker in HPC clusters, please let 
> me know.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Mahmood
> 
> 

-- 
Dr. Christoph Brüning
Universität Würzburg
Rechenzentrum
Am Hubland
D-97074 Würzburg
Tel.: +49 931 31-80499