Containers and How They Work Workshop

NCAR Mesa Laboratory in the Main Seminar Room (ML-132) from 9 a.m. to noon MDT on Friday, July 20.

Containers are a hot topic in high-performance and scientific computing, but while they can provide significant advantages they don't always live up to the hype. That’s why CISL is offering a hands-on class, “Containers and How They Work,” at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory in the Main Seminar Room (ML-132) from 9 a.m. to noon MDT on Friday, July 20.

Space is limited to 50 participants for this free class, so registration is open through July 16 or until the class is full.

The course explains what containers are and how they work, and it surveys some popular implementations with an eye toward supporting scientific workloads. Security and other operational concerns will also be covered for cluster administrators who are thinking about supporting containerized workloads on their systems. Topics to be covered include:

What are containers and how do they work?

• Image formats (tar/filesystem/overlayfs/dense filesystem image/singularity)
• Build vs. run [singularityhub]
• Platform independence/reproducibility
• User namespaces and rootless containers
• Scheduler integration
• Container runtimes (Docker, Charliecloud, Inception, Singularity, others)
• OCI/Standards/runc
• Applications
• Education/outreach
• Cloud
• Reproducible science

The class is intended for anyone who is planning to deploy applications and create application environments using containers; developers and systems support staff getting started with containers; and others interested in learning about containers.

Participants should be familiar with Linux and system operations and should bring a laptop and authentication token for connecting to Geyser and Caldera. Laptops should be fully charged as there may not be enough power receptacles in the seminar room.