Hello everyone, Please join us Thursday May 19th to explore another approach to customized, user-defined, containerized Linux environments to be run in HPC clusters (more detail below). Currently, Research IT's BRC team is actively investigating the feasibility of offering Singularity in the campus's shared Savio cluster. We're seeking use-cases for tests scheduled in the coming months, and will especially welcome participation from researchers or research support staff whose work is suited to containerized computation.
*When:* Thursday, May 19 from noon - 1pm *Where:* 200C Warren Hall, 2195 Hearst St (see building access instructions on parent page <https://wikihub.berkeley.edu/display/istrit/Research+IT+Reading+Group>). *Event format:* The reading group is a brown bag lunch (bring your own) with a short <20 min talk followed by ~40 min group discussion. *Presenter:* Gregory M. Kurtzer, Berkeley Research Computing Program / LBNL HPC Services *Facilitator: *Patrick Schmitz, Research IT Singularity is software that provides a way for researchers and others to package together the artifacts of their computational workflows - one or more Linux applications, with all their dependencies - and run them successfully in a variety of Linux environments. This make it much easier to develop a research workflow on a laptop or a laboratory’s server, then bundle it up and copy it: to a departmental cluster; to Savio, the campus’s high-performance computing (HPC) cluster; to a national HPC resource; or to a cloud computing environment. When it is necessary to run existing computations faster, or to work with larger datasets, Singularity can help reduce the time and effort required to get existing computational environments up and running on a new and more powerful system. Greg Kurtzer, Linux Cluster Architect for the BRC Program's Savio cluster and LBNL's HPC Services group, is the lead developer on the Singularity project, and will describe how it works and the kinds of use cases addressed by the software. We'll also discuss experiments currently underway to explore the feasibility and utility of deploying Singularity in the Berkeley Research Computing Program’s Savio cluster, in support of campus computational research. Please bring your own use cases to the discussion to evaluate whether Singularity is a technology that will support your or your group's research. *Before the meeting, please review Greg's slide deck (PDF) <https://wikihub.berkeley.edu/download/attachments/129695919/Containers_in_HPC_summary_Singularity.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1463152607409&api=v2>.* Greg will give a brief presentation from the deck, but in order to leave ample time for discussion he will lean toward responding to questions rather than dive deeply into technical details covered in some of the slides. ==== *Warren Hall access*: *For those who do not have keycard access to the building, please take the elevator to the second floor (stairwell door requires keycard). Before noon, let the receptionist know you're joining the Reading Group in 200C and s/he will let you in and show you the way. After noon, look for a sign next to the receptionist window to the right as you exit the elevators. We'll post a note with a phone number that you can call or text, and someone will come out to open the locked doors.* Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday of next week, ~Steve -- Steve Masover Research Information Technology (Research IT) http://research-it.berkeley.edu maso...@berkeley.edu 510-642-8488
