Containers

The use of containers allows light virtualization, i.e. it allows a good isolation of the processes, with a limiting overhead.

This documentation is limited to explaining the use of containers on computing machines, it does not address creation at all of images.

Container systems are only available on Dahu and Luke via the Nix environment.

Available container systems are:

• Singularity
• Charliecloud

Environment installation

You need to setup first the Nix environment:

source /applis/site/nix.sh

• For Singularity : nix-env -i singularity
• For Charliecloud : nix-env -i charliecloud

Usage

You must have an existing container image and you have to download it on the machines, it will not be possible for you to create an image on computing clusters.

We will not detail here all the options proposed by the container systems, please refer to each of their documentation.

To execute a container:

• with Singularity

singularity run nom_fichier_image

• with Charliecloud

ch-run nom_directory_image -- command

If you have any question ro need any help on the subject, please send an email to sos-calcul-gricad@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr.