Container and Container Management

Introduction 

The project is focused on implementing a strategy developed in the 2021 NHR container project. A central repository for curated user containers as well as containerized services that are portable among participating NHR centers along with other HPC sites is developed. These developments will also be used to provide HPC-as-a-Service to NHR users. The project also provides documentation and best practices for container runtimes and container management solutions and evaluates and implements security mechanisms and monitoring instrumentation for containers.

Project description

The installation and configuration of applications in HPC is highly dependent on the actual software and hardware environment that users find on the HPC systems of the data centers. This usually makes it difficult to provide special application versions and to switch between different resources.

Container environments have emerged in recent years as a promising tool to circumvent these dependencies. They allow users to create the required software environments on their own, decouple them from the system environment to a large extent and thus make them executable on many different resources without further changes.

Within the scope of this joint project, NHR@KIT is involved in the evaluation of new container technologies, the provision of jointly maintained and standardized containers within the NHR network, the consideration of security-relevant aspects, and the transfer of knowledge to users and administrators.