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/Shifter-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.
For more detailed instructions, see Setup.
Please raise your hand if you need assistance.
Shifter is available using a modified BSD license. The Shifter code stack is available in the NERSC github repository.
Feel free to join the Shifter group or contact Shane, Doug, or Lisa if you have any questions about Shifter in the future.
- 8:30: Welcome and Intro to Containers
- 9:30: Installing Shifter
- Guided Tour of Shifter Installation
- How to roll your own installation for CLE5 and CLE6
- 10:00: Break
- Distribute NERSC logins. Please obtain a NERSC login from tutorial staff during the break
- 10:30: Installing Shifter Con't
- Shifter Gateway Tour
- 11:00: Second hands-on - Shifter
- 11:45: Uses Cases and Optimization
- 12:00: Fin