Stay updated with the latest news about Apptainer and what’s happening at CIQ and the community.
With the exciting collaboration between CIQ and Altair, the fusion of containerization and cloud technologies is propelling OpenRadioss to new heights. We delved into the details of this dynamic partnership in our recent webinar, which features Eric Lequiniou, senior vice president, Radioss development, and Altair solver HPC. You can watch the entire video here. Keep...
Containers have gained massive popularity in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments as users and administrators realize their essential value. To explain the ‘how’ and ‘why’ containers are such a good choice for research data management, CIQ’s Dave Godlove provided an introductory overview in a recent webinar for the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC). You can...
This is the final blog post in a 3-part series that compares and contrasts the security features of Apptainer and Rootless Podman. Part 3 focuses on signed containers, encrypted containers, and miscellaneous topics. At this point in our container security miniseries, we’ve provided some background on Apptainer and Podman, and we’ve done a pretty deep...
This is the second blog post in a 3-part series that compares and contrasts the security features of Apptainer and Rootless Podman. Part 2 focuses on implicit and explicit use of the User Namespace to set up containers and provide root access. In part 1 of this blog post miniseries, we talked about the history...
This is the first blog post in a 3-part series that compares and contrasts the security features of Apptainer and Rootless Podman. Container security is a huge topic encompassing many different facets. Broadly speaking, Apptainer and Podman both provide a “secure“ platform to run containers. But there are subtle differences in the methods they employ...
I’ve been working to containerize various open-source large language models throughout this year, with varying success. I recently got the Llama 2 model containerized with Apptainer and was running some tests with it on GCP, and thought I’d put together a short blog post summarizing where we’re at and how we got here. This has...
In this article, (1) we first introduce the intra-node communication issue with MPI applications and Apptainer without setuid (default version of Apptainer v1.1.x and v1.2.x) that uses unprivileged user namespace that happens with certain types of intra-node communication transport. (2) We show you test results of various MPIs, communication frameworks, interconnects, and intra-node communication transports....
In a previous article, I demonstrated how Warewulf makes it simple to deploy an HPC cluster. Now, I don’t know about you; but, once I have a cluster, I immediately start looking for something to run on it. But I’m a systems guy—not a domain scientist—so that usually means I start benchmarking. Recently at CIQ,...
In our previous blog post, OpenFOAM Supports Apptainer v1.2.0 Template Definition File Feature, I showed you how to use OpenFOAM (R) (OpenCFD Ltd.) with Apptainer; and in A New Approach to MPI in Apptainer, I demonstrated how to build and run a a portable MPI container with Apptainer's “Fully Containerized Model”solution. In this article, I...
Introduction We are happy to announce that OpenFOAM® (OpenCFD Ltd.) is the very first project that officially supports the brand-new Apptainer v1.2.0 feature “template definition file” just released on July 18, 2023. OpenFOAM officially supports Apptainer since OpenFOAM v2212 and since then we have closely worked together on the OpenFOAM container repository. In this blog...
As a follow-up to CIQ’s “Cloud Day with Apptainer” webinar, here’s more information about how to utilize Apptainers with the container/artifact registry offerings around the public cloud space. Apptainer uses the Singularity Image Format (SIF) for its containers, which are supported in many container/artifacts registries through the use of the “OCI Registries As Storage” (ORAS)...
While Apptainer has always supported MPI-enabled applications, it can be tricky to get them working. In this blog post, we’ll detail the “wire-up“ problem that often plagues MPI in containers, traditional approaches and their shortcomings, and provide a new approach that allows you to run completely containerized MPI! The work detailed here has been presented...