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Containers

Many applications and libraries can also be used through container systems, with the updated Singularity tool providing many new features of which we can especially highlight support for Open Containers Initiative - OCI containers (including Docker OCI), and support for secure containers - building and running encrypted containers with RSA keys and passphrases.

Singularity

The ULHPC offers the possibilty to run Singularity containers. Singularity is an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Singularity is optimized for EPC and HPC workloads, allowing untrusted users to run untrusted containers in a trusted way.

Loading Singularity

To use Singularity, you need to load the corresponding Lmod module.

>$ module load tools/Singularity

Warning

Modules are not allowed on the access servers. To test interactively Singularity, rememerber to ask for an interactive job first.

salloc -p interactive --pty bash

Pulling container images

Like Docker, Singularity provide a way to pull images from a Hubs such as DockerHub and Singuarity Hub.

>$ singularity pull docker://ubuntu:latest
You should see the following output:

Output

INFO:    Converting OCI blobs to SIF format
INFO:    Starting build...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob d72e567cc804 done
Copying blob 0f3630e5ff08 done
Copying blob b6a83d81d1f4 done
Copying config bbea2a0436 done
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures
...
INFO:    Creating SIF file...

You may now test the container by executing some inner commands:

>$ singularity exec ubuntu_latest.sif cat /etc/os-release

Output

NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="20.04.1 LTS (Focal Fossa)"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS"
VERSION_ID="20.04"
HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy"
VERSION_CODENAME=focal
UBUNTU_CODENAME=focal

Building container images

Building container images requires to have root privileges. Therefore, users have to build images on their local machine before transfering them to the platform. Please refer to the Data transfer section for this purpose.

Note

Singularity 3 introduces the ability to build your containers in the cloud, so you can easily and securely create containers for your applications without speci al privileges or setup on your local system. The Remote Builder can securely build a container for you from a definition file entered here or via the Singularity CLI (see https://cloud.sylabs.io/builder for more details).

GPU-enabled Singularity containers

This section relies on the very excellent documentation from CSCS. In the following example, a container with CUDA features is build, transfered and tested on the ULHPC platform. This example will pull a CUDA container from DockrHub and setup CUDA examples. For this purpose, a singularity definition file, i.e., cuda_samples.def needs to be created with the following content:

Bootstrap: docker
From: nvidia/cuda:10.1-devel

%post
    apt-get update
    apt-get install -y git
    git clone https://github.com/NVIDIA/cuda-samples.git /usr/local/cuda_samples
    cd /usr/local/cuda_samples
    git fetch origin --tags
    git checkout 10.1.1
    make

%runscript
    /usr/local/cuda_samples/Samples/deviceQuery/deviceQuery

On a local machine having singularity installed, we can build the container image, i.e., cuda_samples.sif using the definition file using the follwing singularity command:

sudo singularity build cuda_samples.sif cuda_samples.def

Warning

You should have root privileges on this machine. Without this condition, you will not be able to built the definition file.

Once the container is built and transfered to your dedicated storage on the ULHPC plaform, the container can be executed with the following command:

# Inside an interactive job on a gpu-enabled node
singularity run --nv cuda_samples.sif

Warning

In order to run a CUDA-enabled container, the --nv option has to be passed to singularity run. According to this option, singularity is going to setup the container environment to use the NVIDIA GPU and the basic CUDA libraries.

Output

CUDA Device Query (Runtime API) version (CUDART static linking)

Detected 1 CUDA Capable device(s)

Device 0: "Tesla V100-SXM2-16GB" CUDA Driver Version / Runtime Version 10.2 / 10.1 CUDA Capability Major/Minor version number: 7.0 Total amount of global memory: 16160 MBytes (16945512448 bytes) (80) Multiprocessors, ( 64) CUDA Cores/MP: 5120 CUDA Cores GPU Max Clock rate: 1530 MHz (1.53 GHz) Memory Clock rate: 877 Mhz Memory Bus Width: 4096-bit L2 Cache Size: 6291456 bytes Maximum Texture Dimension Size (x,y,z) 1D=(131072), 2D=(131072, 65536), 3D=(16384, 16384, 16384) Maximum Layered 1D Texture Size, (num) layers 1D=(32768), 2048 layers Maximum Layered 2D Texture Size, (num) layers 2D=(32768, 32768), 2048 layers Total amount of constant memory: 65536 bytes Total amount of shared memory per block: 49152 bytes Total number of registers available per block: 65536 Warp size: 32 Maximum number of threads per multiprocessor: 2048 Maximum number of threads per block: 1024 Max dimension size of a thread block (x,y,z): (1024, 1024, 64) Max dimension size of a grid size (x,y,z): (2147483647, 65535, 65535) Maximum memory pitch: 2147483647 bytes Texture alignment: 512 bytes Concurrent copy and kernel execution: Yes with 5 copy engine(s) Run time limit on kernels: No Integrated GPU sharing Host Memory: No Support host page-locked memory mapping: Yes Alignment requirement for Surfaces: Yes Device has ECC support: Enabled Device supports Unified Addressing (UVA): Yes Device supports Compute Preemption: Yes Supports Cooperative Kernel Launch: Yes Supports MultiDevice Co-op Kernel Launch: Yes Device PCI Domain ID / Bus ID / location ID: 0 / 30 / 0 Compute Mode: < Default (multiple host threads can use ::cudaSetDevice() with device simultaneously) >

deviceQuery, CUDA Driver = CUDART, CUDA Driver Version = 10.2, CUDA Runtime Version = 10.1, NumDevs = 1 Result = PASS

MPI and Singularity containers

This section relies on the very excellent documentation from CSCS. The following singularity definition file mpi_osu.def can be used to build a container with the osu benchmarks using mpi:

bootstrap: docker
from: debian:jessie

%post
    # Install software
    apt-get update
    apt-get install -y file g++ gcc gfortran make gdb strace realpath wget curl --no-install-recommends

    # Install mpich
    curl -kO https://www.mpich.org/static/downloads/3.1.4/mpich-3.1.4.tar.gz
    tar -zxvf mpich-3.1.4.tar.gz
    cd mpich-3.1.4
    ./configure --disable-fortran --enable-fast=all,O3 --prefix=/usr
    make -j$(nproc)
    make install
    ldconfig

    # Build osu benchmarks
    wget -q http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu/download/mvapich/osu-micro-benchmarks-5.3.2.tar.gz
    tar xf osu-micro-benchmarks-5.3.2.tar.gz
    cd osu-micro-benchmarks-5.3.2
    ./configure --prefix=/usr/local CC=$(which mpicc) CFLAGS=-O3
    make
    make install
    cd ..
    rm -rf osu-micro-benchmarks-5.3.2
    rm osu-micro-benchmarks-5.3.2.tar.gz

%runscript
    /usr/local/libexec/osu-micro-benchmarks/mpi/pt2pt/osu_bw
sudo singularity build mpi_osu.sif mpi_osu.def
Once the container image is ready, you can use it for example inside the following slurm launcher to start a best-effort job:

#!/bin/bash -l
#SBATCH -J ParallelJob
#SBATCH -N 2
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1
#SBATCH --time=05:00
#SBATCH -p batch
#SBATCH --qos=qos-besteffort

module load tools/Singularity
srun -n $SLURM_NTASKS singularity run mpi_osu.sif
The content of the output file:

Output

# OSU MPI Bandwidth Test v5.3.2
# Size      Bandwidth (MB/s)
1                       0.35
2                       0.78
4                       1.70
8                       3.66
16                      7.68
32                     16.38
64                     32.86
128                    66.61
256                    80.12
512                    97.68
1024                  151.57
2048                  274.60
4096                  408.71
8192                  456.51
16384                 565.84
32768                 582.62
65536                 587.17
131072                630.64
262144                656.45
524288                682.37
1048576               712.19
2097152               714.55


Last update: March 4, 2024