Workaround for Communication Issue with MPI Apps & Apptainer without Setuid

Workaround for Communication Issue with MPI Apps & Apptainer without Setuid

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....

Benchmarking Containerized MPI with Apptainer on Dell PowerEdge and Cornelis Omni-Path

Benchmarking Containerized MPI with Apptainer on Dell PowerEdge and Cornelis Omni-Path

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,...

Integrating Site-Specific MPI with an OpenFOAM Official Apptainer Image on Slurm-Managed HPC Environments

Integrating Site-Specific MPI with an OpenFOAM Official Apptainer Image on Slurm-Managed HPC Environments

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...

OpenFOAM Supports Apptainer v1.2.0 Template Definition File Feature

OpenFOAM Supports Apptainer v1.2.0 Template Definition File Feature

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...

Apptainer and Public Cloud Container/Artifact Registry Offerings

Apptainer and Public Cloud Container/Artifact Registry Offerings

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)...

A New Approach to MPI in Apptainer

A New Approach to MPI in Apptainer

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...

Utilizing the AWS EFA with Apptainer

Utilizing the AWS EFA with Apptainer

Apptainer is the most popular container solution for HPC. It has great integration with common specialized HPC hardware/software like GPU devices and MPI software stacks, and the containerized model it brings adds security and reproducibility that makes it ideal for deployment in a multi-user HPC cluster environment. One major use case for Apptainer is in...

What to Expect When Updating from SingularityCE to Apptainer

What to Expect When Updating from SingularityCE to Apptainer

It has been awhile since Singularity became Apptainer. If you haven't updated Singularity to Apptainer, or if you accidentally switched to SingularityCE and now want to switch back, this post is for you! How Singularity became Apptainer In May 2021, a private company wanted to develop their own version of Singularity autonomously.  It created a fork...

Running a W&B Hyperparameter Sweep Agent from an Apptainer

Running a W&B Hyperparameter Sweep Agent from an Apptainer

Apptainer is the most popular container solution for HPC. It has great integration with common specialized HPC hardware/software like GPU devices and MPI software stacks, and the containerized model it brings adds security and reproducibility that make it ideal for deployment in a multi-user HPC cluster environment. One major use case for Apptainer is in...

Managing Containerized Services with Apptainer and Systemd

Managing Containerized Services with Apptainer and Systemd

Apptainer is often compared to Docker as both a container runtime engine and container management environment. In general, each tool targets a different use case; but the two projects notably differ in their runtime strategy. In general, Docker is designed to host system services, and Apptainer is designed to containerize end-user applications (often in a...

Containerizing MoonRay Using Apptainer and Rocky Linux 9
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Containerizing MoonRay Using Apptainer and Rocky Linux 9

MoonRay is DreamWorks Animation’s in-house 3D renderer, used to render DreamWorks movies. DreamWorks has released MoonRay as open source, under the Apache 2.0 license. This is major news for the animation community, with many contributors already onboard with MoonRay. The official document provides two ways of building MoonRay: (1) Building MoonRay in a Docker container...

Debugging Apptainer (and other Go code) with Delve and VScode

Debugging Apptainer (and other Go code) with Delve and VScode

It is possible to configure your environment to start Apptainer (with arbitrary commands and options/arguments) in a Delve debugging session and then attach to the running server with VSCode.  This gives you the ability to set break points, step in/out/over lines of code and functions, interrogate variables during runtime, etc.  But it’s a little tricky...