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Container Adoption in Campus High Performance Computing at Texas A&M University

Published: 17 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Containers promise benefits for both researchers and cyberinfrastructure (CI) professionals, by offering pre-assembled software stacks with a lower barrier to entry. However, the benefits of containers are best realized in a well-developed CI ecosystem with support from administrators. In this paper, we report on the emerging container ecosystem supported by Texas A&M University’s High Performance Research Computing Group (HPRC)1; lessons learned from the perspective of a team that manages a diverse CI portfolio. Here we share our experience with the following: building a container ecosystem for HPRC computing resources, outreach to researcher communities, and documenting use cases that inspire uptake by others. HPRC container deployment has facilitated access to and support for a wide variety of research software at Texas A&M. Our progress is described from multiple perspectives that reflect the varied ways that our researchers and administrators utilize containers.

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cover image ACM Conferences
PEARC '24: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2024: Human Powered Computing
July 2024
608 pages
ISBN:9798400704192
DOI:10.1145/3626203
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Published: 17 July 2024

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  1. Apptainer
  2. Charliecloud
  3. Containers
  4. Cyberinfrastructure
  5. HPC
  6. Podman
  7. Rootless Docker
  8. Singularity
  9. Slurm
  10. Training

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