Containers on Blue Waters: Glossary

Containers are “ligh-weight virtual machines.”

Not all container solutions are suited for HPC.

To minimize the container image size, do not include development tools and other build artifacts

Docker images are ‘layered’

‘Layered’ images have build time advantages

Multi-stage Docker builds are a powerful technique to minimize image size.

Singularity images are ‘flat’

‘Flat’ images have runtime advantages

Docker images can be easily converted to Singularity images

HPC Container Maker (HPCCM) is an open source tool that makes it easier to build container images for HPC applications

HPCCM building blocks uplevel container specification

HPCCM recipes are Python

HPCCM can generate both Dockerfiles and Singularity definition files

TensorFlow is a popular machine learning framework

available binary packages no longer support Blue Waters

TensorFlow’s build system is quite complex