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HPC Container Maker Workflows

HPC Container Maker enables three workflows for creating HPC application container images.

Application Recipes

The MPI Bandwidth example shows how the entire specification of an application container image can be expressed as a HPCCM recipe. Examples are also included for GROMACS and MILC.

The GROMACS and MILC recipes demonstrate how to use multi-stage builds to minimize the size of the resulting container image. The first stage includes the required building blocks and GROMACS source code and then builds the application binary. Build artifacts such as the application source code, compiler, and development versions of the software toolchain are part of the image at this stage. Since only the final application binary and its runtime dependencies are needed when deploying the container image, the container image size can potentially be reduced significantly. The second stage uses a runtime version of the CUDA base image and copies the application binary and the required runtime dependencies from the first stage to generate a significantly smaller container image. HPCCM building blocks provide a method to easily copy the runtime from the first stage into the second stage.

This workflow is the most portable since the HPCCM recipe can be used to generate either a Dockerfile or Singularity definition file, and is the easiest to maintain.

Base Image Generation

On a bare metal system using environment modules, the typical workflow is to first setup the necessary software environment by loading the appropriate modules. With the proper software environment loaded, an application can then be built or run.

This "base" software environment is analogous to the base image used when building a container image. A base image with the proper set of HPC software components present can be used as the starting point for building an application container image.

HPCCM includes base recipes for all combinations of the Ubuntu and CentOS Linux distributions, the GNU and PGI compilers, and the OpenMPI and MVAPICH2 MPI libraries, plus commonly used software components such as the Mellanox OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution, Python, FFTW, and HDF5. The provided base recipe can be easily customized to change component versions or add or subtract building blocks.

For example:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIA/hpc-container-maker/master/recipes/hpcbase-gnu-openmpi.py
$ hpccm --recipe hpcbase-gnu-openmpi.py > Dockerfile
$ sudo docker build -t hpcbase -f Dockerfile .

The hpcbase image, with the software development environment, can now be used in a Dockerfile or Singularity definition file as the base image for building an application container image.

FROM hpcbase

# Application build instructions
...

BootStrap: docker
From: hpcbase

# Application build instructions
...

Template Generation

Instead of going through the intermediate step of building a base image with the necessary HPC software components, the container specification file produced by HPCCM can be extended directly to include the application build instructions. In other words, HPCCM generates the boilerplate container specification syntax to install the necessary HPC software components with the application specific content appended by the user. The drawback to this approach is that it may be cumbersome to incorporate future HPCCM building block improvements.