ACES: Introduction to Containers (Charliecloud) Tutorial
Overview
Instructor: Richard Lawrence, Zhenhua He, and Wes Brashear
Time: Friday, September 22, 2023 — 10:00AM-12:30PM CT
Location: Blocker 220 or online using Zoom
Prerequisites: Current ACCESS ID, Basic Linux/Unix skills
This course introduces the use of Containers using the Charliecloud software suite. Exercises will be performed using the ACES cluster, a composable accelerator testbed at Texas A&M University. This workshop will provide participants with background and a hands-on experience to use basic Charliecloud containers for HPC applications. We will discuss what containers are, why they matter for HPC, and how they work. We'll give an overview of Charliecloud, the unprivileged container solution from Los Alamos National Laboratory's HPC Division. Participants will build toy containers and containerize real HPC applications, and then run them in parallel on a cluster. This will be a highly interactive workshop with lots of Q&A.
Course Materials
Presentation slides
The presentation slides are available as downloadable PDF files.
Agenda
This session will address the following topics:
- "What are containers?" "Why Charliecloud?"
- Pulling images
- Running images
- Building images
- SquashFS workflow