Container computing is revolutionizing the way applications are developed and delivered. It offers opportunities that never existed before for significantly improving efficiency of scientific workflows and easily moving these workflows from the laptop to the supercomputer. Tools like Docker and Shifter enable a new paradigm for scientific and technical computing. However, to fully unlock its potential, users and administrators need to understand how to utilize these new approaches. This tutorial will introduce attendees to the basics of creating container images, explain best practices, and cover more advanced topics such as creating images to be run on HPC platforms using Shifter. The tutorial will also explain how research scientists can utilize container-based computing to accelerate their research and how these tools can boost the impact of their research by enabling better reproducibility and sharing of their scientific process without compromising security.
The content for the handouts and slides will be posted and updated at https://github.com/nersc/2016-11-14-sc16-Container-Tutorial.
This is hands-on tutorial. Participants should bring a laptop and pre-install software in advance to make the best use of time during the tutorial. Participants should install Docker locally on their laptop. Alternatively, participants can have remote access to a system that has docker installed and allows them to run docker commands. Users can also create a dockerhub account in advance at https://hub.docker.com/. This account will be needed to create images on dockerhub. In addition, users should install an ssh client for their operating system so they can access the HPC resources we will use for the Shifter portion of the tutorials. We will attempt to have some alternative options for users who have issues installing Docker.
For more detailed instructions, see Setup.
We'll have several helpers for individual questions during the hands-on part of this tutorial. Since there are so many people attending, we've also set up a Telegram group chat room where you can post questions and solutions to issues you encounter. To use this you will need to have Telegram installed already. Clicking on the the Telegram chat link above will guide you through installation.
Shifter is available using a modified BSD license. The Shifter code stack is available in the NERSC github repository.
##Feedback We'd appreciate you taking a few minutes to fill out a very short survey about this tutorial at the end of the session. Also feel free to contact Shane, Luiz, or Lisa if you have any questions about Shifter in the future.
- 8:30: Welcome and Intro to Docker
- 9:00: First hands-on
- 9:30: Intro to Shifter and how it is different
- 10:00: Break
- Distribute NERSC logins. Please obtain a NERSC login from tutorial staff during the break
- 10:30: Second hands-on - Shifter
- 11:15: Uses Cases in the Real World
- 11:30: Final Hands-on