Index
Introduction#
Containers are a solution to the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. They also resolve installation problems by packaging all the dependencies of an application within a self-sustainable image, a.k.a a container.
What's a container?
Put simply, a container consists of an entire runtime environment: an application, plus all its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files needed to run it, bundled into one package. By containerizing the application platform and its dependencies, differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure are abstracted away.
Container solutions#
There are several ways to run containers in general, and on Sherlock specifically.
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Apptainer (formerly Singularity) is an open source container platform designed to run complex applications on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in a simple, portable, and reproducible way.
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More to come...