Title: Portable, high-performance containers for HPC,
Abstract: Building and deploying software on high-end computing systems is a
challenging task. High performance applications have to reliably run across
multiple platforms and environments, and make use of site-specific resources
while resolving complicated software-stack dependencies. Containers are a type
of lightweight virtualization technology that attempt to solve this problem by
packaging applications and their environments into standard units of software
that are: portable, easy to build and deploy, have a small footprint, and low
runtime overhead. In this work we present an extension to the container runtime
of Shifter that provides containerized applications with a mechanism to access
GPU accelerators and specialized networking from the host system, effectively
enabling performance portability of containers across HPC resources. The
presented extension makes possible to rapidly deploy high-performance software
on supercomputers from containerized applications that have been developed,
built, and tested in non-HPC commodity hardware, e.g. the laptop or workstation
of a researcher.