Containers on HPC with Apptainer

Course instance in May 2024

You can follow the dates this course is given on the course page. Dates are not yet known and registration is not yet open, though.

Improve your cluster workflows! You’ve had a basic course on working with a cluster - but what do people actually do? This course shows practical examples and tips which may help you, but aren’t usually covered in either basic or advanced courses.

We won’t go so deep into each topic that you know everything about it, but you learn what is possible, see some examples, and know where to follow up on the tools that are right for you. The format is designed to be “fireside chat with experts”, a combination of demos, type-along, and independent exercises. You can engage at different levels, depending on your interest.

Prerequisites

• Basic HPC usage course (if you don’t have, many of the things we talk about won’t make sense, but you might pick up something anyway).

• A bit of experience using a HPC cluster (technically optional, but will allow you to engage with the material at a deeper level).

• Access to some HPC computer cluster to do most exercises. (Slurm-based, but most are these days). (If you don’t have, you can’t do all exercises - but still might learn something!)

15 min	Intro to containers (on HPC)
20 min	Basics of running containers
15 min	Intro to container images
10 min	Break
25 min	Building Apptainer images
15 min	Binding folders into your container
05 min	Open discussion and where to go next

The lesson

• Intro to containers (on HPC)
• Basics of running containers
• Intro to container images
• Building Apptainer images
• Binding folders into your container
• MPI programs and containers
• Running containers that use GPUs
• Sharing reproducible containers

Extras

• Services and apps
• Tips, tricks and frequently asked questions

Exercises

• Verify Apptainer Installation
• Building Your First Container
• Python environment in a container

Who is the course for?

This course is for people using clusters or other larger computing resources. It’s not a basic course, but also not extremely advanced. It lets you see some examples and know what people actually do, and then you can follow up with more reading, courses, or direct help later on.

Some learner personas:

• You’ve just taken a basic HPC course, and while you mostly understand how the basic pices work, you are left wondering “How does this all fit together? How do people combine all of these tools into an actual whole workflow?”.

  You care about some real examples and things you can use right now, but wouldn’t mind seeing some advanced or out-of-scope stuff as long as you don’t have to spend too much mental effort on it.

  You’ll probably do the more basic exercises and watch the rest as a demo until you come back to it later (if needed).

• You’ve been using the cluster for a while and doing your work just fine - or so you think. It works well, but you know there must be some other tricks out there that can make your life (if not work) even better.

  You’ll probably attend and do the more advanced exercises, while passively watching some of the more basic demos.

About the course

This lesson is part of Tuesday Tools & Techniques for High Performance Computing.